Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

They were so-extreme. So irresponsible! They led such angular, slapdash lives, always going off on some tangent, calling over their shoulders for her to come too. And for as long as Meg could remember she had been stumbling after, picking up the trail of cast-off belongings and abandoned projects. All she really wanted was to live like other people.

She tried to keep the house neat, like her friends' houses, and to put flowers in the vases and to hide, somehow, whatever tangle of tubes and electrical wires Duncan was working on at the moment. But then it seemed so hopeless when she knew how soon they would be moving on. "We're nomads," Justine told her, "think of it that way"-as if making it sound romantic would help. But there was nothing romantic about this tedious round of utility deposits, rental contracts, high school transcripts and interrupted magazine subscriptions. "He's ruining our lives!" she told Justine. Justine looked astonished. "But Meggie darling, we can't be the ones to say-" Then Meg's anger would extend to her mother, too, who was so gullible and so quick to give in, and she closed herself up in her room (if they were in a house where she had a room) and said no more.

She kept herself occupied with sewing, or pasting pictures in her scrapbook full of model homes-French windows and carpeted kitchens and white velvet couches. She straightened up her closet with all her shoes set side by side and pointing in the same direction. She ironed her own dresses, as she had since she was nine. (Justine thought there was no point to ironing, as long as things were clean.) At the age of ten she had baked her first cake, which everyone admired but no one ate because they were too busy rushing off somewhere; they seemed to live on potato chips from vending machines. Nothing ever worked on a schedule. She was encouraged to bring her friends home at any hour of the day or night.

"This family is not a closed unit," Duncan told her-apparently his only rule, if you could call it that. But how could she bring friends when her parents were so certain to make fools of themselves? "Oh, I just love your folks," girls were always saying, little dreaming what agony it would be to have them for their own. For Justine might be found barefoot and waving her dirty playing cards, or sitting at the kitchen table with three or four unsuitable friends, or racing about looking for her broken straw carry-all in order to go to the diner whose food she preferred to her own. She had a high-handed, boisterous way of acting sometimes and she was likely to refer to Duncan publicly as "Meg's second cousin," her idea of a joke. And Duncan! Spouting irrelevant, useless facts, thinking out loud in startling ways, leaving her friends stunned and stupid-looking. His idea of a joke was to hang idiotic newspaper and ladies' magazine pages all over the house, bearing what he thought were appropriate messages. On Justine's birthday he pasted up a bank ad saying WE'RE INCREASING OUR INTEREST, and after Meg spent too much money on a dress (only because she wanted to look like the other girls for a change, not all homemade and tacked together) she found a page Scotch-taped to her closet door:

HAVE YOU EVER HAD A BAD TIME IN LEVI'S?

Then she had snatched up the page and stalked in to where Duncan sat inventing a new keyboard arrangement for the typewriter. "Act your age!"

she told him. But when he looked up his face was so surprised and unguarded, and she saw that he really was aging, there were dry lines around his eyes and two tiny crescents left by his wide, dippy smile. So she laid the paper down gently, after all, and went away defeated.

Now she sighed, remembering, and Arthur squeezed her fingers. "In an hour this will all be over," he told her.

"It will never be over."

"I don't understand."

"We're going to be demolished," she said. "I feel it."

But now she had insulted him. He straightened up, which made him look smaller. He said, "Don't you think I can have a reasonable discussion with my own girl's parents?"

"Yes but-"

"You forget, I'm a minister. I've convinced families who swore they'd cut off their daughters without a penny. I've convinced fathers who claimed that-"

"But it wasn't you their daughters were marrying."

"Now don't worry. If worst comes to worst we'll just go away quietly and have the ceremony in my own church."

But neither of them wanted that. They wanted everything perfect. Arthur wanted her to be happy, and Meg would only be happy with a white dress that dipped to a point at the waist, Sarah Cantleigh's veil, and a bouquet of baby's breath. She wanted to walk down the aisle of the family's church in Baltimore where her mother had been married; she would like to be guarded by rows and rows of aunts and uncles and second cousins, grave Peck eyes approving her choice. Bridal showers, long-grained rice, Great-Grandma's sixpence in her shoe. Arthur waiting beside the minister, turning his pale, shiny face to watch her procession.

Whenever he looked at her, she felt queenly. All right, so he was not a handsome man, but would a handsome man treat her as adoringly as Arthur Milsom did? When they went to lectures she looked at the lecturer and Arthur looked at her. She felt the thin moon of his face turned upon her.

He assisted her in and out of cars, through doorways, up the shallowest steps, his hands just barely brushing her. (The aunts would love his manners.) He devoted his entire attention to her, so much so that sometimes, he said, he worried about his jealous God. Nobody had ever, in all her life, felt that way about her before.

A car drove up in front of the house, chugging and grinding familiarly.

"There's Mama now!" Meg said. "Look, she beat him home after all." She rose and went out to the porch. Justine was still seated behind the wheel, straight-backed and prim, unguarded by even the vestige of a door. The car looked like a cross-section of something. But, "Certainly makes it easier to get in and out!" she called to Meg, and she waved gaily and stepped onto the sidewalk. "Coming, Grandfather?"

"Mama, I want to talk to you," Meg said.

But then up spoke Dorcas Britt, the lady next door, calling over the hedge in a large, rich voice that seemed to mock Meg's. "Justine, honey!

I got to talk to you."

"A man came along doing eighty and flung Grandfather into the windshield," Justine said.

"Mama."

The house was swept suddenly with a variety of colors and shapes- the white, tottering grandfather, Justine flicking back her yellow hair, Dorcas all chartreuse and magenta on red patent-leather spike-heeled sandals. Arthur stood up with his fingers laced in front of him, as he did when greeting church members after the sermon. He wore a determined smile. Meg felt a twist; was she doomed to be embarrassed by everyone, all her life, even Arthur? "Mama, Grandfather, you remember Arthur," she said. "Mrs. Britt, this is Arthur, my-Arthur Milsom."

"My baby has been kidnapped," Dorcas told him.

Her baby was nine years old and she was kidnapped regularly, always by her father, who did not have visiting rights, but Arthur didn't know that and he grew white around the lips. "Oh, my heavens!" he cried.

"Arthur. It's all right," Meg told him.

"All right?" said Dorcas. "To you, maybe."

"Grandfather was zonked in the forehead," Justine said.

Which caused Arthur to spin next in the grandfather's direction, full of a new supply of horror and sympathy. He hadn't learned yet. Such an expenditure of emotion would drain you in no time, living here. "Arthur,"

Meg said.

"The man was going eighty, at least," said Justine. "How else could he have ripped a door clean off like that?"

"It was already hanging by one hinge, Mama."

" 'You were going eighty,' I told him, but guess what he said? It's against the law to open a car door on the street side. Did you know that?