Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

“Now, on a bigger plane,” Macon called to Muriel as the engines roared up, “you’d hardly feel the takeoff. But here you’d better brace yourself.”

Muriel nodded, wide-eyed, gripping the seat ahead of her. “What’s that light that’s blinking in front of the pilot?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s that little needle that keeps sweeping round and round?”

“I don’t know.”

He felt he’d disappointed her. “I’m used to jets, not these toys,” he told her. She nodded again, accepting that. It occurred to Macon that he was really a very worldly and well-traveled man.

The plane started taxiing. Every pebble on the runway jolted it; every jolt sent a series of creaks through the framework. They gathered speed. The crew, suddenly grave and professional, made complicated adjustments to their instruments. The wheels left the ground. “Oh!” Muriel said, and she turned to Macon with her face all lit up.

“We’re off,” he told her.

“I’m flying!”

They rose — with some effort, Macon felt — over the fields surrounding the airport, over a stand of trees and a grid of houses. Above-ground swimming pools dotted backyards here and there like pale blue thumbtacks. Muriel pressed so close to her window that she left a circle of mist on the glass. “Oh, look!” she said to Macon, and then she said something else that he couldn’t hear. The engines on this plane were loud and harsh, and the Pepsi can was rolling around with a clattering sound, and also the pilot was bellowing to the copilot, saying something about his refrigerator. “So I wake up in the middle of the night,” he was shouting, “damn thing’s thudding and thumping—”

Muriel said, “Wouldn’t Alexander enjoy this!”

Macon hadn’t seen Alexander enjoying anything yet, but he said dutifully, “We’ll have to bring him sometime.”

“We’ll have to take just lots of trips! France and Spain and Switzerland…”

“Well,” Macon said, “there’s the little matter of money.”

“Just America, then. California, Florida…”

California and Florida took money too, Macon should have said (and Florida wasn’t even given space in his guidebook), but for the moment, he was borne along by her vision of things. “Look!” she said, and she pointed to something. Macon leaned across the aisle to see what she meant. The airplane flew so low that it might have been following road signs; he had an intimate view of farmlands, woodlands, roofs of houses. It came to him very suddenly that every little roof concealed actual lives. Well, of course he’d known that, but all at once it took his breath away. He saw how real those lives were to the people who lived them — how intense and private and absorbing. He stared past Muriel with his mouth open. Whatever she had wanted him to look at must be long past by now, but still he went on gazing out her window.

Porter and the others were talking money. Or Porter was talking money and the others were half listening. Porter was planning ahead for income taxes. He was interested in something called a chicken straddle. “The way it works,” he said, “you invest in baby chicks right now, before the end of the year. Deduct the cost of feed and such. Then sell the grown hens in January and collect the profit.”

Rose wrinkled her forehead. She said, “But chickens are so prone to colds. Or would you call it distemper. And December and January aren’t usually all that warm here.”

“They wouldn’t be here in Baltimore, Rose. God knows where they’d be. I mean these are not chickens you actually see; they’re a way to manage our taxes.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Charles said. “I hate to get involved in things someone else would be handling. It’s someone else’s word those chickens even exist.”

“You people have no imagination,” Porter said.

The four of them stood around the card table in the sun porch, helping Rose with her Christmas present for Liberty. She had constructed an addition to Liberty’s dollhouse — a garage with a guest apartment above it. The garage was convincingly untidy. Miniature wood chips littered the floor around a stack of twig-sized fire logs, and a coil of green wire made a perfect garden hose. Now they were working on the upstairs. Rose was stuffing an armchair cushion no bigger than an aspirin. Charles was cutting a sheet of wallpaper from a sample book. Porter was drilling holes for the curtain rods. There was hardly elbow room; so Macon, who had just come in with Edward, stood back and merely watched.

“Besides,” Charles said, “chickens are really not, I don’t know, very classy animals. I would hate to go round saying I’m a chicken magnate.”

“You don’t even have to mention the fact,” Porter said.

“ Beef magnate, now; that I wouldn’t mind. Beef has more of a ring to it.”

“They’re not offering a straddle for beef, Charles.”

Macon picked up some color photos that sat beside the wallpaper book. The top photo showed a window in a room he didn’t recognize — a white-framed window with louvered shutters closed across its lower half. The next was a group portrait. Four people — blurry, out of focus — stood in a line in front of the couch. The woman wore an apron, the men wore black suits. There was something artificial about their posture. They were lined up too precisely; none of them touched the others. “Who are these people?” Macon asked.

Rose glanced over. “That’s the family from Liberty’s dollhouse,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Her mother sent me those pictures.”

“It’s a family with nothing but grown-ups?” he asked.

“One’s a boy; you just can’t tell. And one’s a grandpa or a butler; June says Liberty switches him back and forth.”

Macon laid the photos aside without looking at the rest of them. He knelt to pat Edward. “A cattle straddle,” Charles was saying thoughtfully. Macon suddenly wished he were at Muriel’s. He wrapped his arms around Edward and imagined he smelled her sharp perfume deep in Edward’s fur.

Oh, above all else he was an orderly man. He was happiest with a regular scheme of things. He tended to eat the same meals over and over and to wear the same clothes; to drop off his cleaning on a certain set day and to pay all his bills on another. The teller who helped him on his first trip to a bank was the teller he went to forever after, even if she proved not to be efficient, even if the next teller’s line was shorter. There was no room in his life for anyone as unpredictable as Muriel. Or as extreme. Or as… well, unlikable, sometimes.

Her youthfulness was not appealing but unsettling. She barely remembered Vietnam and had no idea where she’d been when Kennedy was shot. She made him anxious about his own age, which had not previously troubled him. He realized how stiffly he walked after he had been sitting in one position too long; how he favored his back, always expecting it to go out on him again; how once was plenty whenever they made love.

And she talked so much — almost ceaselessly; while Macon was the kind of man to whom silence was better than music. (“Listen! They’re playing my song,” he used to say when Sarah switched the radio off.) She talked about blushers, straighteners, cellulite, hemlines, winter skin. She was interested in the appearance of things, only the appearance: in lipstick shades and nail wrapping and facial masques and split ends. Once, on one of her more attractive days, he told her she was looking very nice, and she grew so flustered that she stumbled over a curb. She asked if that was because she had tied her hair back; and was it the hair itself or the ribbon; or rather the color of the ribbon, which she’d feared might be just a little too bright and set off the tone of her complexion wrong. And didn’t he think her hair was hopeless, kerblamming out the way it did in the slightest bit of humidity? Till he was sorry he had ever brought it up. Well, not sorry, exactly, but tired. Exhausted.