Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

“No, of course not,” Macon said. “I just meant—”

“Couldn’t pay me to leave it.”

“No, me either.”

“You a Baltimore man?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“No place like it.”

“Certainly isn’t,” Macon said.

But a picture came to his mind of San Francisco floating on mist like the Emerald City, viewed from one of those streets so high and steep that you really could hang your head over and hear the wind blow.

He’d left Baltimore on a sleety day with ice coating the airport runways, and he hadn’t been gone all that long; but when he returned it was spring. The sun was shining and the trees were tipped with green. It was still fairly cool but he drove with his windows down. The breeze smelled exactly like Vouvray — flowery with a hint of mothballs underneath.

On Singleton Street, crocuses were poking through the hard squares of dirt in front of basement windows. Rugs and bedspreads flapped in backyards. A whole cache of babies had surfaced. They cruised imperiously in their strollers, propelled by their mothers or by pairs of grandmothers. Old people sat out on the sidewalk in beach chairs and wheelchairs, and groups of men stood about on corners, their hands in their pockets and their posture elaborately casual — the unemployed, Macon imagined, emerging from the darkened living rooms where they’d spent the winter watching TV. He caught snatches of their conversation:

“What’s going down, man?”

“Nothing much.”

“What you been up to?”

“Not a whole lot.”

He parked in front of Muriel’s house, where Dominick Saddler was working on Muriel’s car. The hood was open and Dominick was deep in its innards; all Macon saw was his jeans and his gigantic, ragged sneakers, a band of bare flesh showing above his cowhide belt. On either side of him stood the Butler twins, talking away a mile a minute. “So she says to us we’re grounded—”

“Can’t go out with no one till Friday—”

“Takes away our fake i.d.’s—”

“Won’t let us answer the phone—”

“We march upstairs and slam our bedroom door, like, just a little slam to let her know what we think of her—”

“And up she comes with a screwdriver and takes our door off its hinges!”

“Hmm,” Dominick said.

Macon rested his bag on the hood and peered down into the engine. “Car acting up again?” he asked.

The Butler twins said, “Hey there, Macon,” and Dominick straightened and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He was a dark, good-looking boy whose bulging muscles made Macon feel inadequate. “Damn thing keeps stalling out,” he said.

“How’d Muriel get to work?”

“Had to take the bus.”

Macon was hoping to hear she’d stayed home.

He climbed the steps and unlocked the front door. Just inside, Edward greeted him, squeaking and doing back flips and trying to hold still long enough to be petted. Macon walked through the rest of the house. Clearly, everyone had left in a hurry. The sofa was opened out. (Claire must have had another fight with her folks.) The kitchen table was littered with dishes and no one had put the cream away. Macon did that. Then he took his bag upstairs. Muriel’s bed was unmade and her robe was slung across a chair. There was a snarl of hair in the pin tray on her bureau. He picked it up between thumb and index finger and dropped it into the wastebasket. It occurred to him (not for the first time) that the world was divided sharply down the middle: Some lived careful lives and some lived careless lives, and everything that happened could be explained by the difference between them. But he could not have said, not in a million years, why he was so moved by the sight of Muriel’s thin quilt trailing across the floor where she must have dragged it when she rose in the morning.

It wasn’t quite time for Alexander to come home from school, so he thought he would walk the dog. He put Edward on his leash and let himself out the front door. When he passed the Butler twins again they said, “Hey, there, Macon,” singsong as ever, while Dominick cursed and reached for a wrench.

The men standing on the corner were discussing a rumor of jobs in Texas. Someone’s brother-in-law had found work there. Macon passed with his head lowered, feeling uncomfortably privileged. He skirted a welcome mat that had been scrubbed and set out to dry on the pavement. The women here took spring cleaning seriously, he saw. They shook their dust mops out of upstairs windows; they sat on their sills to polish the panes with crumpled sheets of newspapers. They staggered between houses with borrowed vacuum cleaners, rug machines, and gallon jugs of upholstery shampoo. Macon rounded the block and started home, having paused to let Edward pee against a maple sapling.

Just as he was approaching Singleton Street, whom should he see but Alexander scurrying up ahead. There was no mistaking that stiff little figure with the clumsy backpack. “Wait!” Alexander was crying. “Wait for me!” The Ebbetts children, some distance away, turned and called something back. Macon couldn’t hear what they said but he knew the tone, all right — that high, mocking chant. “Nyah-nyah-nyah-NYAH-nyah!” Alexander started running, stumbling over his own shoes. Behind him came another group, two older boys and a girl with red hair, and they began jeering too. Alexander wheeled and looked at them. His face was somehow smaller than usual. “Go,” Macon told Edward, and he dropped the leash. Edward didn’t need any urging. His ears had perked at the sound of Alexander’s voice, and now he hurtled after him. The three older children scattered as he flew through them, barking. He drew up short in front of Alexander, and Alexander knelt to hug his neck.

When Macon arrived, he said, “Are you all right?”

Alexander nodded and got to his feet.

“What was that all about?” Macon asked him.

Alexander said, “Nothing.”

But when they started walking again, he slipped his hand into Macon’s.

Those cool little fingers were so distinct, so particular, so full of character. Macon tightened his grip and felt a pleasant kind of sorrow sweeping through him. Oh, his life had regained all its old perils. He was forced to worry once again about nuclear war and the future of the planet. He often had the same secret, guilty thought that had come to him after Ethan was born: From this time on I can never be completely happy.

Not that he was before, of course.

Macon’s U.S. edition was going to be five separate pamphlets now, divided geographically, slipcased together so you had to buy all five even if you needed only one. Macon thought this was immoral. He said so when Julian stopped by for the West Coast material. “What’s immoral about it?” Julian asked. He wasn’t really paying attention; Macon could see that. He was filing mental notes on Muriel’s household, no doubt the real purpose of this unannounced, unnecessary visit. Even though he’d already collected his material, he was wandering around the living room in an abstracted way, first examining a framed school photo of Alexander and then a beaded moccasin that Claire had left on the couch. It was Saturday and the others were in the kitchen, but Macon had no intention of letting Julian meet them.

“It’s always immoral to force a person to buy something he doesn’t want,” Macon said. “If he only wants the Midwest, he shouldn’t have to buy New England too, for heaven’s sake.”

Julian said, “Is that your friend I hear out there? Is it Muriel?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Macon said.

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

“She’s busy.”

“I’d really like to meet her.”

“Why? Hasn’t Rose given you a full report?”