Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

“Not a thing,” Macon assured her.

She kissed Alexander, leaving a dark red mark on his cheek. She made one last survey in the mirror beside the front door, meanwhile calling, “Don’t let him stay up too late now, Dommie; don’t let him watch anything scary on TV—”

Macon said, “Muriel.”

“I look like the wrath of God.”

Macon? Do youto believe that when an invitation involved a meal, the guests should arrive exactly on time. Never mind that they often caught their hostess in curlers; they went on doing what they were taught. So Macon pressed the buzzer in the lobby at precisely six twenty-seven, and Porter and Charles joined them in front of the elevator. They both told Muriel it was nice to see her. Then they rode upward in a gloomy silence, eyes fixed on the numbers over the door. Charles carried a potted jade tree, Porter another bottle of wine.

“Isn’t this exciting?” Muriel said. “We’re their first invited guests.”

“At home now we’d be watching the CBS Evening News,” Charles told her.

Muriel couldn’t seem to think of any answer to that.

By six thirty sharp they were ringing the doorbell, standing in a hushed corridor carpeted in off-white. Rose opened the door and called, “They’re here!” and set her face lightly against each of theirs. She wore Grandmother Leary’s lace-trimmed company apron and she smelled of lavender soap, the same as always.

But there was a strip of peeling sunburn across the bridge of her nose.

Julian, natty and casual in a navy turtleneck and white slacks (when it wasn’t yet Memorial Day), fixed the drinks while Rose retreated to the kitchen. This was one of those ultra-modern apartments where the rooms all swam into each other, so they could see her flitting back and forth. Julian passed around snapshots of Hawaii. Either he had used inferior film or else Hawaii was a very different place from Baltimore, because some of the colors were wrong. The trees appeared to be blue. In most of the photos Rose stood in front of flower beds or flowering shrubs, wearing a white sleeveless dress Macon had never seen before, hugging her arms and smiling too broadly so that she looked older than she was. “I tell Rose you’d think she went on our honeymoon by herself,” Julian said. “I’m the one who took the pictures because Rose never did learn how to work my camera.”

“She didn’t?” Macon asked.

“It was one of those German models with all the buttons.”

“She couldn’t figure out the buttons?”

“I tell her, ‘People will think I wasn’t even there.’ ”

“Why, Rose could have taken that camera apart and put it together twice over,” Macon said.

“No, this was one of those German models with—”

“It wasn’t very logically constructed,” Rose called from the kitchen.

“Ah,” Macon said, sitting back.

She entered the room with a tray and placed it on the glass coffee table. Then she knelt and began to spread pâté on little crackers. There was some change in the way she moved, Macon noticed. She was more graceful, but also more self-conscious. She offered the pâté first to Muriel, then to each of her brothers, last to Julian. “In Hawaii I started learning to sail,” she said. She pronounced the two i ’s in “Hawaii” separately; Macon thought it sounded affected. “Now I’m going to practice out on the Bay.”

“She’s trying to find her sea legs,” Julian said. “She tends to feel motion-sick.”

Macon bit into his cracker. The pâté was something familiar. It was rough in texture but delicate in taste; there was a kind of melting flavor that he believed came from adding a great amount of butter. The recipe was Sarah’s. He sat very still, not chewing. He was flooded by a subtle blend of tarragon and cream and home.

“Oh, I know just what you’re going through,” Muriel said to Rose. “All I have to do is look at a boat and I get nauseous.”

Macon swallowed and gazed down at the carpet between his feet. He waited for someone to correct her, but nobody did. That was even worse.

In bed she said, “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you? Would you ever think of leaving me? You won’t be like the others, will you? Will you promise not to leave me?”

“Yes, yes,” he said, floating in and out of dreams.

“You do take me seriously, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“Oh, Muriel, for pity’s sake…” he said.

But later, when she turned in her sleep and moved away from him, his feet followed hers of their own accord to the other side of the bed.

Macon was sitting in a hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba, when the phone rang. Actually it took him a second to realize it was the phone. He happened to be having a very good time with a mysterious object he’d just discovered — an ivory-painted metal cylinder affixed to the wall above the bed. He’d never noticed such a thing before, although he’d stayed in this hotel on two previous trips. When he touched the cylinder to see what it was, it rotated, disappearing into the wall, while from within the wall a light bulb swung out already lit. At the same moment, the phone rang. Macon experienced an instant of confusion during which he imagined it was the cylinder that was ringing. Then he saw the telephone on the nightstand. Still he was confused. No one had his number, so far as he knew.

He picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?”

“Macon.”

His heart lurched. He said, “Sarah?”

“Have I caught you at a bad time?”

“No, no… How did you know where I was?”

“Well, Julian thought you’d be in either Toronto or Winnipeg by now,” she said, “so I looked in your last guidebook, and I knew the hotels where you discussed night noises were the ones where you stayed yourself, so…”

“Is anything wrong?” he asked.

“No, I just needed a favor. Would it be all right with you if I moved back into our house?”

“Um—”

“Just as a place to stay,” she said hastily. “Just for a little while. My lease runs out at the end of the month and I can’t find a new apartment.”

“But the house is a mess,” he told her.

“Oh, I’ll take care of that.”

“No, I mean something happened to it over the winter, pipes burst or something, ceiling came down—”

“Yes, I know.”

“You do?”

“Your brothers told me.”

“My brothers?”

“I went to ask them your whereabouts when they wouldn’t answer their phone. And Rose said she’d been over to the house herself and—”

“You went to Rose’s, too?”

“No, Rose was at your brothers’.”

“Oh.”

“She’s living there for a while.”

“I see,” he said. Then he said, “She’s what?”

“Well, June has had her baby,” Sarah said, “so she asked Porter to keep the children a while.”

“But what does that have to do with Rose?” he said. “Does Rose imagine Porter can’t open a tin of soup for them? And how come June sent them away?”

“Oh, you know June, she always was kind of a birdbrain.”

She sounded like her old self, when she said that. Up till now there’d been something careful about her voice, something wary and ready to retreat, but now a certain chuckly, confiding quality emerged. Macon leaned back against his pillow.

“She told the children she needs time to bond,” Sarah said.

“Time to what?”

“She and her husband need to bond with the baby.”

“Good grief,” Macon said.

“When Rose heard that, she told Porter she was coming home. Anyhow she didn’t think the boys were eating right, Porter and Charles; and also there’s a crack in the side of the house and she wanted to get it patched before it spreads.”