Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

“You cannot be called good until you accept Christ as your personal savior,” she said, and her voice echoed off the cinderblocks with a bell-like, clanging tone.

Liam’s jaw dropped. “Well,” he said, “I guess…”

Words failed him for a moment.

“I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree,” he said finally.

Words must have failed Louise too, because she just gazed at him for a moment with an expression he couldn’t read. Then she turned away and opened the outer door.

Eunice stood on the sidewalk, poised to enter. She took a step backward.

“Oh. Eunice,” Liam said.

“Have I come at a bad time?”

“No, no…”

Louise gave him a questioning look. Liam said, “Eunice, this is my daughter, Louise, and my grandson, Jonah.” He told Louise, “Eunice is-Why, you’ve seen her before. You saw her in Dr. Morrow’s waiting room.”

“I did?” Louise said.

Eunice said, “She did?”

Oops, a slip. Though not too hard to cover up, as it happened. Liam told Eunice, “I realized that only later. I knew you seemed familiar.”

Eunice continued to look puzzled, but she held out her hand to Louise and said, “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you,” Louise said, shaking her hand. “So, do you two have plans for the day?”

“Eunice is just helping me with my résumé,” Liam told her.

“Oh,” Louise said. “Well, good. You’re going to look for a real job! Or at least… I mean, surely the zayda job doesn’t require a résumé, does it?”

“The…? No, no, no. This would be for something else.”

“The very last place on earth I can see him is in a preschool,” Louise told Eunice.

“Preschool?” Eunice asked.

“That’s what he was talking about the other day.”

Liam said, “I know you have to be going, Louise. Bye, Jonah! Good luck with the coloring book.”

Jonah hoisted his knapsack higher on his back and said, “Bye.” Louise said, “Thanks for watching him, Dad.” She seemed to have forgotten their quarrel. She gave him a peck on the cheek, waved to Eunice, and followed Jonah out the door.

“You saw me at Dr. Morrow’s?” Eunice asked Liam.

She was still standing on the sidewalk, although he held the door open invitingly. She had her arms folded across her chest and she seemed planted there.

He said, “Yes, wasn’t that a coincidence?”

“I don’t recall seeing you ,” she told him.

“You don’t? I guess I’m not very memorable.”

This made her smile, a little. She unfolded her arms and stepped forward to enter the building.

She was wearing one of her skirts today, and a blouse that showed her cleavage. Her breasts were two full, soft mounds. When she passed him, she gave off a faint scent of vanilla and he had an urge to step closer in order to get a deeper breath of it. He stood back against the door, however, with his hands pressed behind him. There was something bothering the far corners of his mind, something casting a shadow.

“I should have accepted her invitation,” he said once they were inside the apartment.

Eunice said, “What?”

“Louise invited me to her church just now and I didn’t accept.”

He dropped into an armchair, feeling disheartened. Too late, he remembered that he was supposed to seat his guest first, and he started to struggle up again but then Eunice sat down in the rocker.

“I’ve never been a good father,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sure you’re a wonderful father!”

“No, a good father would say, ‘So what if I’m not religious? This could be our chance to get on a better footing!’ But I was so intent on my… principles. My standards. I blew it.”

Eunice said, “Well, anyway. Your grandson is really cute.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“I didn’t picture you being a grandfather.”

He wondered what this signified. He said, “I guess it does make me seem awfully old.”

“No, it doesn’t! You’re not old!”

“I must seem pretty old to somebody your age,” he said. He waited a beat, and then he said, “How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I’m thirty-eight.”

“You are?”

So she wasn’t younger than Xanthe after all. He would have to tell Kitty.

When Liam was thirty-eight he already had two children. His first marriage was already behind him, and he had started to worry that his second was behind him. But Eunice still seemed so fresh-faced and so… unwritten on. She sat very straight-backed, with her bulky sandals placed wide apart, her hands clasped in the valley of paisley skirt between her knees. Her glasses reflected the light in a way that turned them white, giving her a blank, open look.

“You could always change your mind,” she told him.

“Excuse me?”

“You could call your daughter on the phone and say you would come to her church after all.”

“Well, yes.”

“Would she have reached home by now?”

“I doubt it.”

“Does she have a cell phone?”

“Look,” he said. “I’m not going to call.”

Eunice rocked back in her rocker.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Okay…”

“It’s difficult to explain.”

She went on watching him.

He said, “Did you print up that résumé?”

He couldn’t have cared less about the résumé. In fact, the very word was beginning to strike him as annoying. Those pretentious foreign accent marks! For God’s sake, didn’t some term exist in ordinary English? But Eunice immediately brightened and said, “The résumé!” (She even pronounced it foreignly, with a long a in the first syllable.) She bent to dig through her purse, which sat beside her on the floor, and she came up with a crisp sheaf of papers folded in half. “I have to say,” she told him, “I’m not entirely satisfied with it.”

“Why is that?”

“I couldn’t seem to give it any focus. If you’re not applying at Cope, I don’t know what particular strengths I should be emphasizing-what areas of interest.”

He gave a short bark of laughter, and she glanced up from the papers.

“I wouldn’t know either,” he told her. “Basically, I have no areas of interest.”

“Oh, that can’t be true,” she said.

“It is, though,” he said. And then he said, “It really is. Sometimes I think my life is just… drying up and hardening, like one of those mouse carcasses you find beneath a radiator.”

If Eunice was surprised by this, it was nothing compared to how he himself felt. He seemed to hear his own words as if someone else had spoken them. He cleared his throat and spread his fingers across his knees.

“Well, only on off days, of course,” he said.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she told him.

“You do?”

“I’m always thinking, Why don’t I have any hobbies? Other people do. Other people develop these passions; they collect things or they research things or they birdwatch or they snorkel. They join book groups or they reenact the Civil War. I’m just trying to make it through to bedtime every night.”

“Yes,” Liam said.

“I don’t see myself as a mouse carcass, though, but more like one of those buds that haven’t opened. I’m hanging there on the bush all closed up.”

“That would make sense,” Liam said. “You’re younger. You have everything ahead of you.”

“Unless I never open, and fall off the branch still closed,” Eunice said.

Before Liam could make any comment, she said, “Well, enough of that! I sound like some kind of basket case, don’t I?”

“No,” Liam said.

Then he said, “I turned sixty on my last birthday.”

“I know,” Eunice said.