Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

She was driving her long gray boat of a car. Macon sat in front beside her, and Edward sat in back, his ears out horizontal with joy. Edward was always happy to be invited for a car ride, though very soon he’d turn cranky. (“How much longer ?” you could almost hear him whine.) It was lucky they weren’t going far.

“I got this car on account of its big old trunk,” Muriel said. She slung it dashingly around a corner. “I needed it for my errand business. Guess how much it cost?”

“Um…”

“Only two hundred dollars. That’s because it needed work, but I took it to this boy down the street from where I live. I said, ‘Here’s the deal. You fix my car up, I let you have the use of it three nights a week and all day Sunday.’ Wasn’t that a good idea?”

“Very inventive,” Macon said.

“I’ve had to be inventive. It’s been scrape and scrounge, nail and knuckle, ever since Norman left me,” she said. She had pulled into a space in front of a little shopping center, but she made no move to get out of the car. “I’ve lain awake, oh, many a night, thinking up ways to earn money. It was bad enough when room and board came free, but after Mrs. Brimm died it was worse; her house passed on to her son and I had to pay him rent. Her son’s an old skinflint. Always wanting to jack up the price. I said, ‘How’s about this? You leave the rent where it is and I won’t trouble you with maintenance. I’ll tend to it all myself,’ I said. ‘Think of the headaches you’ll save.’ So he agreed and now you should see what I have to deal with, things go wrong and I can’t fix them and so we just live with them. Leaky roof, stopped-up sink, faucet dripping hot water so my gas bill’s out of this world, but at least I’ve kept the rent down. And I’ve got about fifty jobs, if you count them all up. You could say I’m lucky; I’m good at spotting a chance. Like those lessons at Doggie, Do, or another time a course in massage at the Y. The massage turned out to be a dud, seems you have to have a license and all like that, but I will say Doggie, Do paid off. And also I’m trying to start this research service; that’s on account of all I picked up helping the school librarian. Wrote out these little pink cards I passed around at Towson State: We-Search Research. Xeroxed these flyers and mailed them to every Maryland name in the Writer’s Directory. Men and Women of Letters! I said. Do you want a long slow illness that will effectively kill off a character without unsightly disfigurement? So far no one’s answered but I’m still hoping. Twice now I’ve paid for an entire Ocean City vacation just by going up and down the beach offering folks these box lunches me and Alexander fixed in our motel room every morning. We lug them in Alexander’s red wagon; I call out, ‘Cold drinks! Sandwiches! Step right up!’ And this is not even counting the regular jobs, like the Meow-Bow or before that the Rapid-Eze. Tiresome old Rapid-Eze; they did let me bring Alexander but it was nothing but copying documents and tedious things like that, canceled checks and invoices, little chits of things. I’ve never been so disinterested.”

Macon stirred and said, “Don’t you mean uninterested?”

“Exactly. Wouldn’t you be? Copies of letters, copies of exams, copies of articles on how to shop for a mortgage. Knitting instructions, crochet instructions, all rolling out of the machine real slow and stately like they’re such a big deal. Finally I quit. When I got my training at Doggie, Do I said, ‘I quit. I’ve had it!’ Why don’t we try the grocery.”

Macon felt confused for a second. Then he said, “Oh. All right.”

“You go into the grocery, put Edward on a down-stay outside. I’ll wait here in the car and see if he behaves.”

“All right.”

He climbed from the car and opened the back door for Edward. He led him over to the grocery. He tapped his foot twice. Edward looked distressed, but he lay down. Was this humane, when the sidewalk was still so wet? Reluctantly, Macon stepped into the store. It had the old-fashioned smell of brown paper bags. When he looked back out, Edward’s expression was heartbreaking. He wore a puzzled, anxious smile and he was watching the door intently.

Macon cruised an aisle full of fruits and vegetables. He picked up an apple and considered it and set it down again. Then he went back outside. Edward was still in place. Muriel had emerged from her car and was leaning against the fender, making faces into a brown plastic compact. “Give him lots of praise!” she called, snapping the compact shut. Macon clucked and patted Edward’s head.

They went next door to the drugstore. “This time we’ll both go in,” Muriel said.

“Is that safe?”

“We’ll have to try it sooner or later.”

They strolled the length of the hair care aisle, all the way back to cosmetics, where Muriel stopped to try on a lipstick. Macon imagined Edward yawning and getting up and leaving. Muriel said, “Too pink.” She took a tissue from her purse and rubbed the pink off. Her own lipstick stayed on, as if it were not merely a 1940s color but a 1940s formula — the glossless, cakey substance that used to cling to pillowcases, napkins, and the rims of coffee cups. She said, “What are you doing for dinner tomorrow night?”

“For—?”

“Come and eat at my house.”

He blinked.

“Come on. We’ll have fun.”

“Um…”

“Just for dinner, you and me and Alexander. Say six o’clock. Number Sixteen Singleton Street. Know where that is?”

“Oh, well, I don’t believe I’m free then,” Macon said.

“Think it over a while,” she told him.

They went outside. Edward was still there but he was standing up, bristling in the direction of a Chesapeake Bay retriever almost a full block away. “Shoot,” Muriel said. “Just when I thought we were getting someplace.” She made him lie down again. Then she released him and the three of them walked on. Macon was wondering how soon he could decently say that he had thought it over and now remembered he definitely had an invitation elsewhere. They rounded a corner. “Oh, look, a thrift shop!” Muriel said. “My biggest weakness.” She tapped her foot at Edward. “This time, I’ll go in,” she said. “I want to see what they have. You step back a bit and watch he doesn’t stand up like before.”

She went inside the thrift shop while Macon waited, skulking around the parking meters. Edward knew he was there, though. He kept turning his head and giving Macon beseeching looks.

Macon saw Muriel at the front of the shop, picking up and setting down little gilded cups without saucers, chipped green glass florists’ vases, ugly tin brooches as big as ashtrays. Then he saw her dimly in the back where the clothes were. She drifted into sight and out again like a fish in dark water. She appeared all at once in the doorway, holding up a hat. “Macon? What do you think?” she called. It was a dusty beige turban with a jewel pinned to its center, a great false topaz like an eye.

“Very interesting,” Macon said. He was starting to feel the cold.

Muriel vanished again, and Edward sighed and settled his chin on his paws.

A teenaged girl walked past — a gypsy kind of girl with layers of flouncy skirts and a purple satin knapsack plastered all over with Grateful Dead emblems. Edward tensed. He watched every step she took; he rearranged his position to watch after her as she left. But he said nothing, and Macon — tensed himself — felt relieved but also a little let down. He’d been prepared to leap into action. All at once the silence seemed unusually deep; no other people passed. He experienced one of those hallucinations of sound that he sometimes got on planes or trains. He heard Muriel’s voice, gritty and thin, rattling along. “At the tone the time will be…” she said, and then she sang, “You will find your love in…” and then she shouted, “Cold drinks! Sandwiches! Step right up!” It seemed she had webbed his mind with her stories, wound him in slender steely threads from her life — her Shirley Temple childhood, unsavory girlhood, Norman flinging the screen out the window, Alexander mewing like a newborn kitten, Muriel wheeling on Doberman pinschers and scattering her salmon-pink business cards and galloping down the beach, all spiky limbs and flying hair, hauling a little red wagon full of lunches.