Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Anne Tyler
Praise
Title Page
CHAPTER 1 / The Airmail Bowling Ball
CHAPTER 2 / The Department of Reality
CHAPTER 3 / The Man Who Forgot How to Fly
CHAPTER 4 / Famous Rainbows
CHAPTER 5 / People Who Don’t Know the Answers
CHAPTER 6 / Sample Rains
CHAPTER 7 / Organized Marriage
CHAPTER 8 / I Should Never Tell You Anything
CHAPTER 9 / The Flooded Sewing Box
CHAPTER 10 / Recovering from the Hearts-of-Palm Flu
Extract from Vinegar Girl
Copyright
When eighteen year old Ian Bedloe pricks the bubble of his family’s optimistic self-deception, his brother Danny drives into a wall, his sister-in-law falls apart, and his parents age before his eyes. Consumed by guilt Ian finds the hope of forgiveness at the Church of the Second Chance, and leaves college to cope with the three children he has inherited and his own embarrassing new religion.
Twenty years on, Ian’s prospects of a second chance are receding fast when, out of the heart of the domesticity that has engulfed him, strides a figure who will bring him new life.
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Breathing Lessons and other bestselling novels, including The Accidental Tourist, Ladder of Years, A Patchwork Planet and The Amateur Marriage. In 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as ‘the greatest novelist writing in English’. She has lived for many years with her family in Baltimore, where her novels are set.
If Morning Ever Comes
The Tin Can Tree
A Slipping-Down Life
The Clock Winder
Celestial Navigation
Searching for Caleb
Earthly Possessions
Morgan’s Passing
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The Accidental Tourist
Breathing Lessons
Ladder of Years
A Patchwork Planet
Back When We Were Grownups
The Amateur Marriage
Digging to Amerisca
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a novel by Anne Tyler is a subject for rejoicing. Compulsively readable, realistic, funny, touching, apparently honest; her sagas of lower-middle America have a flavour that even readers at many removes from this world find irresistible’
Gillian Tindall, The Times
‘If you have never come across the novels of Anne Tyler, don’t waste a second. Go out and buy as many as you can and get ready to be bowled over. She is a writer who combines piercingly acute observation with reliably unsentimental compassion. She sees and describes the ludicrous and the painful in everyday life. She never shies away from the truly ghastly consequences that can result from tiny mistakes, but nor does she close the door on unexpected joy. If you are already a fan, this one will certainly not disappoint you’
Sue Gaisford, Independent
‘A cliché we live with is that happiness and goodness are areas where novelists do not show their vitality. Anne Tyler’s art (and in other novels than this one) shows this to be sub-Jansenist nonsense. The domestic scenes here – which also manifest the workings of Time – are rich, affectionate and subtle. Ian’s complex attempt to lead the best life he can is enthrallingly done. Anne Tyler is a great humanist artist, and her novels sharpen one’s appreciation of life, one’s estimation of the various and always difficult ways of not only surviving, but respecting it’
Paul Binding, New Statesman
‘Here is a writer who can wander out of the pages of the TLS and into a dumper display at John Menzies in Paddington Station. On both sides of the Atlantic she receives ecstatic reviews, and in the States she shifts millions of units; here is someone who really has had a book turned into an Oscar-winning film and won the Pulitzer Prize. Saint Maybe is arguably one of Tyler’s best, although when you’re dealing with this sort of quality it wouldn’t be a very interesting argument; suffice it to say that it is breathtakingly beautiful, and that in the Bedloes she has found a clan as memorable as Tyler’s other extraordinary families . . . Tyler produces a new novel every three years, which means that there will not be another novel as rich, as wise, as moving or as entertaining as Saint Maybe until 1994. I suggest that we all write to her in Baltimore and tell her to get a move on’
Nick Hornby, Literary Review
ON WAVERLY STREET, everybody knew everybody else. It was only one short block, after all—a narrow strip of patched and repatched pavement, bracketed between a high stone cemetery wall at one end and the commercial clutter of Govans Road at the other. The trees were elderly maples with lumpy, bulbous trunks. The squat clapboard houses seemed mostly front porch.
And each house had its own particular role to play. Number Nine, for instance, was foreign. A constantly shifting assortment of Middle Eastern graduate students came and went, attending classes at Johns Hopkins, and the scent of exotic spices drifted from their kitchen every evening at suppertime. Number Six was referred to as the newlyweds’, although the Crains had been married two years now and were beginning to look a bit worn around the edges. And Number Eight was the Bedloe family. They were never just the Bedloes, but the Bedloe family, Waverly Street’s version of the ideal, apple-pie household: two amiable parents, three good-looking children, a dog, a cat, a scattering of goldfish.
In fact, the oldest of those children had long ago married and left—moved out to Baltimore County and started a family of her own—and the second-born was nearing thirty. But somehow the Bedloes were stuck in people’s minds at a stage from a dozen years back, when Claudia was a college girl in bobby socks and Danny was captain of his high-school football team and Ian, the baby (his parents’ big surprise), was still tearing down the sidewalk on his tricycle with a miniature license plate from a cereal box wired to the handlebar.
Now Ian was seventeen and, like the rest of his family, large-boned and handsome and easygoing, quick to make friends, fond of a good time. He had the Bedloe golden-brown hair, golden skin, and sleepy-looking brown eyes, although his mouth was his mother’s, a pale beige mouth quirking upward at the corners. He liked to wear ragged jeans and plaid shirts—cotton broadcloth in summer, flannel in winter—unbuttoned all the way to expose a stretched-out T-shirt underneath. His shoes were high-top sneakers held together with electrical tape. This was in 1965, when Poe High School still maintained at least a vestige of a dress code, and his teachers were forever sending him home to put on something more presentable. (But his mother was likely to greet him in baggy, lint-covered slacks and one of his own shirts, her fading blond curls pinned scrappily back with a granddaughter’s pink plastic hairbow. She would not have passed the dress code either.) Also, there were complaints about the quality of lan’s schoolwork. He was bright, his teachers said, but lazy. Content to slide through with low B’s or even C’s. It was the spring of his junior year and if he didn’t soon mend his ways, no self-respecting college would have him.
Ian listened to all this with a tolerant, bemused expression. Things would turn out fine, he felt. Hadn’t they always? (None of the Bedloes was a worrier.) Crowds of loyal friends had surrounded him since kindergarten. His sweetheart, Cicely Brown, was the prettiest girl in the junior class. His mother doted on him and his father—Poe’s combination algebra teacher and baseball coach—let him pitch in nearly every game, and not just because they were related, either. His father claimed Ian had talent. In fact sometimes Ian daydreamed about pitching for the Orioles, but he knew he didn’t have that much talent. He was a medium kind of guy, all in all.
Even so, there were moments when he believed that someday, somehow, he was going to end up famous. Famous for what, he couldn’t quite say; but he’d be walking up the back steps or something and all at once he would imagine a camera zooming in on him, filming his life story. He imagined the level, cultured voice of his biographer saying, “Ian climbed the steps. He opened the door. He entered the kitchen.”
“Have a good day, hon?” his mother asked, passing through with a laundry basket.
“Oh,” he said, “the usual run of scholastic triumphs and athletic glories.” And he set his books on the table.
His biographer said, “He set his books on the table.”
That was the spring that Ian’s brother fell in love. Up till then Danny had had his share of girlfriends—various decorative Peggies or Debbies to hang upon his arm—but somehow nothing had come of them. He was always getting dumped, it seemed, or sadly disillusioned. His mother had started fretting that he’d passed the point of no return and would wind up a seedy bachelor type. Now here was Lucy, slender and pretty and dressed in red, standing in the Bedloes’ front hall with her back so straight, her purse held so firmly in both hands, that she seemed even smaller than she was. She seemed childlike, in fact, although Danny described her as a “woman” when he introduced her. “Mom, Dad, Ian, I’d like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life.” Then Danny turned to Mrs. Jordan, who had chosen this inopportune moment to step across the street and borrow the pinking shears. “Mrs. Jordan: Lucy Dean.”
His mother, skipping several stages of acquaintanceship, swept Lucy into a hug. (Clearly more was called for than a handshake.) His father said, “Well, now! What do you know!” The dog gave Lucy’s crotch a friendly sniff, while Mrs. Jordan—an older lady, the soul of tact—hastily murmured something or other and backed out the door. And Ian clamped his palms in his armpits and grinned at no one in particular.
They moved to the living room, Ian bringing up the rear. Lucy perched in an easy chair and Danny settled on its arm, with one hand resting protectively behind her loose knot of black hair. To Ian, Lucy resembled some brightly feathered bird held captive by his brown plaid family. Her face was very small, a cameo face. Her dress was scoop-necked and slim-waisted and full-skirted. She wore extremely red lipstick that seemed not gaudy, for some reason, but brave. Ian was entranced.
“Tell us everything,” Bee Bedloe ordered. “Where you met, how you got to know each other—everything.”
She and lan’s father had seated themselves on the sofa. (Ian’s father, who had a baseball player’s mild, sloping build, was pulling in his stomach.) Ian himself remained slouched against the door frame.
“We met at the post office,” Danny said. He beamed down at Lucy, who smiled back at him trustfully.
Bee said, “Oh? You two work together?”
“No, no,” Lucy said, in a surprisingly croaky little drawl. “I went in to mail a package and Danny was the one who waited on me.”
Danny told them, “She was mailing a package to Cheyenne, Wyoming, by air. I told her it would cost twenty dollars and twenty-seven cents. You could see it was more than she’d planned on—”
“I said, ‘Twenty twenty-seven! Great God Almighty!’” Lucy squawked, startling everyone.
“So I told her, ‘It’s cheaper by parcel post, you know. That would be four sixty-three.’ ‘Let me think,’ she says, and moves on out of the way. Gives up her place at the counter. Stands a few feet down from me, frowning at the wall.”
“I had to take a minute to decide,” Lucy explained.
“Frowns at the wall for the longest time. Three customers go ahead of her. Finally I say, ‘Miss? You ready?’ But she just goes on frowning.”
“I was mailing some odds and ends to my ex-husband and I wanted to be shed of them as fast as possible,” Lucy said.
A little jolt passed through the room.
Bee said, “Ex-husband?”
“Half of me wanted him to get that box tomorrow, even yesterday if it could be arranged, but the other half was counting pennies. ‘That’s fifteen-and-some dollars’ difference,’ this other half was saying. ‘Think of all the groceries fifteen dollars could buy. Or shoes and stuff for the children.’”
“Children?”
“What got to me,” Danny said, “was how she wouldn’t be hurried. How it didn’t bother her what other people made of her. I mean she just stood there pondering, little bit of a person. Then finally she said, ‘Well,’ and straightened her shoulders and chose to spring for airmail.”
“It mattered just enough, I decided,” Lucy said. “It was worth it just for the satisfaction.”
“If she had said parcel post I might have let her go,” Danny said. “But airmail! I admired that. I asked if she’d like to have dinner.”
“He was the best-looking thing I’d seen in ages,” Lucy told the Bedloes. “I said I’d be thrilled to have dinner.”
Bee and Doug Bedloe sat side by side, smiling extra hard as if someone had just informed them that they were being photographed.
There was this about the Bedloes: They believed that every part of their lives was absolutely wonderful. It wasn’t just an act, either. They really did believe it. Or at least lan’s mother did, and she was the one who set the tone. Her marriage was a great joy to her, her house made her happy every time she walked into it, and her children were attractive and kind and universally liked. When bad things happened—the usual accidents, illnesses, jogs in the established pattern—Bee treated them with eye-rolling good humor, as if they were the stuff of situation comedy. They would form new chapters in the lighthearted ongoing saga she entertained the neighbors with: How Claudia Totaled the Car. How Ian Got Suspended from First Grade.
As for Ian, he believed it too but only after a kind of hitch, a moment of hesitation. For instance, from time to time he had the feeling that his father was something of a joke at Poe High—ineffectual at discipline, and muddled in his explanation of the more complicated algebraic functions. But Bee said he was the most popular teacher Poe had ever employed, and in fact that was true. Yes, certainly it was true. Ian knew she was right.
Or look at Claudia. The family’s one scholar, she had dropped out of college her senior year to get married, and then the babies started coming so thick and so fast that they had to be named alphabetically: Abbie, Barney, Cindy, Davey . . . Where would it all end? some cynical voice inquired from the depths of lan’s mind. Xavier? Zelda? But his mother said she hoped they would progress to double letters—Aaron Abel and Bonnie Belinda—like items on a crowded catalog page. Then Ian saw Claudia’s children as a tumbling hodgepodge heaped in a basket, and he was forced to smile.
Or Danny. Wasn’t it sort of a comedown that Danny had gone to work at the post office straight out of high school, when both sides of the family as far back as anyone could remember had been teachers? (“Educators,” Bee called them.) But Bee pointed out how lucky he was, knowing so early in life what he wanted and settling in so contentedly. Then Ian readjusted; he shifted gears or something and whir! he was rolling along with the others, impressed by Danny’s good fortune.
He had always assumed he was the only one who experienced that hitch in his thoughts. He assumed it until the day Lucy arrived, when he felt his parents’ hidden start at the word “ex-husband.” Wait. The girl of Danny’s dreams had chosen someone else before him? And was saddling him with someone else’s children besides? His father looked confused. His mother’s broad face developed a brittle, tight surface, like something easily broken.
Ian himself absorbed the notion with no trouble. Of course, he wanted only the best for Danny. He had worshiped Danny since infancy—the family’s all-round athlete, talented in every known sport but not the least stuck up about it, unfailingly sunny-natured and patient with his little brother. But as Ian saw it, Lucy was the best. The ex-husband was only a minor drawback; same for the children. What mattered was that pile of black hair and those long black lashes. None of Danny’s previous girls could begin to compare with this one.
But he saw how steadily his parents smiled—stony, glazed smiles as they murmured chitchat. His mother said it certainly was an unusual way for a couple to meet. His father said he’d have opted for parcel post, himself; so he would never have been asked to dinner, would he, heh-heh. His mother said that speaking of dinner, Lucy must stay for spaghetti. Danny said she couldn’t; he was taking her to Haussner’s Restaurant to celebrate their engagement. The word “engagement” sent another shock through the room; for now it was plain that, yes, Danny really was set on this. Bee said maybe later in the week, then. Lucy thanked her in her foggy, fascinating voice. They all stood up. Ian stepped away from the door frame and received his first direct glance from Lucy. She had pure gray eyes, almost silver, and up close her little nose revealed a sprinkling of freckles.
After Danny and Lucy had left, his parents returned to the living room and sat back down on the couch. Supper was more than ready, but no one mentioned eating. Ian wandered over to the upright piano in the corner. Dozens of family photos, framed in dull brass or varnished wood, stood on an ivory lace runner. Other, larger photos hung behind, nearly obscuring the flowered wallpaper that had darkened over the years to the color of a manila envelope. He studied those: his grandmother standing grimly erect beside his seated grandfather, his Great-Aunt Bess trying to master a hula hoop, Danny in a satin track uniform with a first-place ribbon hung around his neck. Whenever Danny did something he enjoyed, his face would shine with a fine sweat. Even eating made him sweat, or listening to music. And in this photograph—where he’d recently been sprinting under hot sunshine, after all, and then had the pleasure of winning besides—he gleamed; he seemed metallic. You could imagine he was a statue. Ian lightly touched the frame. (Dust felted his finger. For all her great clattery housecleaning, Bee tended to let the little things slide.) Behind him, his mother said, “Well, we’ve been wishing for years he’d get married.”
“That’s true, we have,” his father said.
“And now that the draft’s stepping up . . .”
“Oh, yes, the draft,” his father said faintly.
“Did she mention how many children she had?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“If she has lots,” Bee told him, “we can mix them in with Claudia’s and form our own baseball team.”
She laughed. Ian turned to look at her, but he was too late. Already she had passed smoothly over to unquestioning delight, and he had missed his chance to see how she did it.
Lucy did not have lots of children after all; just two. A girl aged six and a boy aged three. She lived a couple of miles away, Danny said, in a rented apartment above a Hampden pharmacy; and she left the children with the pharmacist’s wife when she went to work every day. He told Ian this later that night, when he stopped by Ian’s room on his way to bed. He said she worked as a waitress at the Fill ’Er Up Café—the only job she could find that allowed her to arrange her hours around her children’s. But he would soon put an end to that, Danny said. No working wife for Danny.
He said she had mailed that package at the request of her ex-husband. Her ex-husband was getting remarried and he wanted her to send him his things. Lucy had packed up every trace of him: the geisha girl figurine he’d won tossing darts at the fair, for instance, and the bowling ball in the red-and-white canvas bag that matched her own. Danny listed these objects in a detailed and lingering way, as if even they had fallen within the circle of his love. The bowling ball, he said, had accounted for much of the package’s weight (a total of twenty-eight pounds). Lucy had also mentioned a trophy cup, which couldn’t have been so very light either.
Ian tried to imagine Lucy bowling. Illogically, he pictured her in the shoes she had worn to the house—little red pumps with red cloth roses at the toes. The high heels would make tiny dimples in the glossy wood of the runway.
“She’s a wonderful cook,” Danny said. “Whenever I come to dinner she fixes a special meal for me and she lights new candles. Lucy feels people should always eat by candlelight. And sometimes she makes her own holders; last night it was two red apples. Wasn’t that smart? She has the smartest ideas. She’s good with napkins, too; she folds them into these different shapes, accordions or butterflies or wigwams, because Lucy says . . .”
Lucy says, Lucy feels, Lucy believes. She seemed almost present in the room with them. Danny lounged in the doorway with his hands in his trouser pockets, his eyes slanting slightly the way they did when something fired him up. The knot of his tie hung loose on his chest, which made him look tipsy even though he wasn’t.
How did their evenings end? Ian wanted to ask. Did the two of them make out on her couch? Or maybe even go all the way?
Danny spoke of Lucy’s knack for interior decorating, her concern for her children, her difficult past life. “Both her parents died in a car crash when she was still in her teens,” he said, “and that husband of hers must not have been much, considering how far he’s fallen behind on the child support. Not that she complains. She never says a word against anyone; that’s not her style. I tell you, Ian, I’ve been looking for a woman like Lucy all my life, but I’d started to think I’d never find her. I almost thought there was something wrong with me. I’d meet these girls who seemed so pretty and so nice and then it would turn out I’d been hoodwinked; they were flirts or users or constitutional liars and everyone knew it but me. Shouldn’t there be some sort of training course in how to judge a woman? How are guys supposed to figure these things out? Well, some just do; it’s some kind of gift, I guess. But I was starting to worry I was jinxed. Then along comes Lucy. Two weeks ago she was a total stranger, can you believe it? And yet I’m certain she’s the one. She makes her own curtains and she cuts her children’s hair herself. She can plant a snipped-off twig in a pot and it will turn green and start growing. When I circle her waist with my hands, my fingertips almost meet.”
Ian somehow knew exactly how that would feel: her body narrowing between his palms like a slender, graceful vase.
Danny and Lucy were married a week later, in the Presbyterian church on Dober Street that the Bedloes sporadically attended. Lucy wore a rose-colored suit and a white pillbox hat with a bow. She stood in front of the minister with her arm linked through Danny’s, and her feet were placed primly together so that Ian’s eyes were riveted to the seams on the backs of her stockings. He had never seen seams on stockings before, if you didn’t count old black-and-white movies. He wondered how she got them so straight. They looked like two fountain-pen lines drawn with the aid of a ruler.
Pathetically few guests dotted the bride’s side of the church. The first pew held a couple of waitresses from the Fill ’Er Up Café, both wearing cone-shaped hairdos that made them seem the tallest people present. Behind them sat the pharmacist and his wife, with Lucy’s two children huddled against the wife. Ian had met the children at a family dinner the night before, and he hadn’t thought much of them. Agatha was as cloddish as her name—plain and thick, pasty-faced. Thomas was thin and dark and nimble but no more responsive to grownups. During the wedding they both gazed elsewhere—up at the vaulted ceiling, around at the pebbly pink windows—till Mrs. Myrdal leaned over and whispered sharply. Agatha was the kind of child who breathed through her mouth.
But the groom’s side! First came the parents, Doug Bedloe belted in and slicked down in an unfamiliar way and Bee wearing a new striped dress from Hutzler’s. Then in the second pew, a row of Daleys—Claudia and her husband, Macy, and all five of their rustling, fidgeting children, even little Ellen, although a sitter had been hired to lurk at the rear of the church just in case. Ian sat in the third pew with Cicely, holding hands. And if he turned around, he could see Danny’s friends from high school and his co-workers from the post office and just about the whole neighborhood as well: the Cahns, the Crains, the Mercers, Cicely’s parents and her brother Stevie, Mrs. Jordan in her bald fur stole even on this warm May day, and every last one of the foreigners—a row of tan young men wearing identical shiny black suits. The foreigners never missed a chance to attend a celebration.
The minister spoke at some length about the institution of marriage. Danny shifted his weight a few times but Lucy stayed dutifully motionless. Ian wondered why a hat like hers was called a pillbox. It looked more like a pill than a box, he thought—a big white aspirin.
Cicely squeezed his hand and Ian squeezed back, but not as hard. (She was wearing his class ring, bulky as a brass knuckle.) Distantly, he registered the bridal couple’s “I do’s”—Danny’s so emphatic that the younger Daleys giggled, Lucy’s throaty and endearing. Then Dr. Prescott pronounced them man and wife, and they kissed. It wasn’t one of those show-off kisses you sometimes see at weddings. Lucy just turned and looked up into Danny’s eyes, and Danny set both hands on her shoulders and bent to press his lips against hers very gently. After that they stepped back and smiled at the guests, and everyone rose and came forward to offer congratulations.
The reception was held at the Bedloes’, with fancy little cakes that Bee and Claudia had been baking for days, and Doug’s famous spiked punch in a plastic garbage can reserved only for that purpose, and bottled soft drinks for the children. There were more than enough children. Claudia’s brood chased each other through a forest of grownups’ legs. Rafe Hamnett’s sexy twin ten-year-old daughters stood over by the piano, each slinging out a hip and brandishing a paper straw like a cigarette. Only Lucy’s two seemed not to be enjoying themselves. They sat on a windowsill, almost hidden by the curtains on either side. At one point Cicely dragged Ian over to try and make friends with them—she was known at school for being “considerate”—but it wasn’t a success. Thomas shrank against his sister and picked at a Band-Aid wrapped around his thumb. Agatha kept her arms folded and stared past them at her mother, who was offering a small hand to each guest as Danny introduced her. (“Honey, this is Melvin Cahn, who lives next door. Melvin, like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life.”)
Cicely asked Agatha, “Isn’t it nice that you have a new uncle? Think of it: Uncle Ian.”
Agatha shifted her gaze to Cicely as if it took real effort.
“Isn’t that nice?” Cicely said.
Agatha finally nodded.
“She’s overcome with joy,” Ian told Cicely.
Cicely made a face at him. She was a pert, sweet, roundeyed girl with a bubbly head of blond curls. Today she wore a yellow shift that turned her breasts into two little upturned teacups. Ian laced his fingers through hers and said, “Let’s go to your place.”
“Go? I haven’t said hello to your folks yet.”
But she let him lead her away, past Doug Bedloe with his punch dipper poised, past her little brother with his six-gun, past the foreigners practicing their English on the front porch. “Is it not fine day,” one of them said—Joe or Jim or Jack; they all had these super-American names shortened from who-knows-what. They stood back respectfully and followed Cicely with their eyes (how they admired blondes!) as Ian guided her down the steps.
Next to the curb, Danny’s blue Chevy stood waiting. The bride and groom were driving to Williamsburg for their honeymoon—just a three-day trip because that was the longest Lucy felt comfortable leaving the children. Some of the neighborhood teenagers had tied tin cans to the rear bumper and chalked JUST MARRIED across the trunk. Married! Ian thought, and he realized, all at once, that Danny really had gone through with it. He was a husband now and would never again stop by lan’s bedroom door at night, his suit coat hooked over his thumb, to talk about the Baltimore Colts. Ian felt a rush of sorrow. But Cicely’s parents wouldn’t stay at the reception forever, so he said, “Let’s go,” and they started walking toward her house.
That summer, Ian got a job with Sid ’n’ Ed’s A-1 Movers—a very local sort of company consisting of a single van. Each morning he reported to a garage on Greenmount, and then he and two lean, black, jokey men drove to some shabby house where they heaved liquor cartons and furniture into the van for a couple of hours. Then they drove to some other house, often even shabbier, and heaved it all out again. Ian managed to enjoy the work because he thought of it as weight lifting. He had always been very conscious of muscles. As a small boy, admiring Danny and his friends at sports, he had focused upon their forearms—the braiding beneath the skin as they swung a bat or punched a volleyball. There, he thought, was the telling difference, more than whiskers or deep voices. And he had examined his own reedy arms and wondered if they would ever change. But when it happened he must have been asleep, for all at once two summers ago he had noticed as he was mowing the lawn—why, look at that! The ropy muscles from wrist to elbow, the distinct blue cords of his veins. He had flexed a fist and gazed down, hypnotized, till his mother hallooed from the porch and asked how long he planned to stand there.
Well, like a lot of other things, muscles had turned out to be no big deal after all. (Now he thought it might be sleeping with a girl that made the difference.) But even so, he continued to work at building himself up. He deliberately chose the heaviest pieces of furniture, pushing ahead of Lou and LeDon, who were happy to lag behind with the bric-a-brac. Then in the evenings he came home hot and sweaty and swaggery, and his mother would say, “Phew! Go take a shower before you do another thing.” He stood under the shower till the water ran cold, after which he dressed in fresh jeans and a T-shirt and went off to eat dinner at Cicely’s. His mother hardly cooked at all that summer. Claudia was sick as a dog with her latest pregnancy, so often as not Bee would have spent the day baby-sitting. Sometimes she said, “What, you’re eating at the Browns’ again?” But he could tell she was just as glad. She and his father would have a sandwich in front of the TV, or they’d walk over to Lipton’s. She said, “Mind you don’t wear out your welcome, now.” Then she forgot about him.
He and Cicely twined their feet together under the table while her mother served him double portions of everything. Cicely slid a hand secretly up his thigh, and Ian rearranged his napkin and swallowed and told Mrs. Brown how much he liked her cooking. Mr. Brown was usually absent, out selling insurance to home-owners who could be reached only in the evenings, but Cicely’s little brother was there—a pest and a nuisance. He would tag along after dinner, boring Ian to death with baseball questions. He hung around the two of them on the screened back porch. “Stee-vie!” Cicely would say, and Stevie would ask, “What? What am I doing?”
“Don’t you have any friends of your own?”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Ma, Stevie’s being a brat again.”
“Stevie, come along inside, now,” Mrs. Brown would call.
Then Stevie would leave, kicking the glider as he passed and lowering his prickly, white-blond head so no one could see his face.
Ian and Cicely had been going together since ninth grade. They were planning to get married after college, although sometimes Cicely teased him and said she’d have to see who else asked her, first. “Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and not for better,” she said. But then she would move over into Ian’s lap and wrap her arms around his neck. She smelled of baby powder, warm and pink. She wore pink underwear, too—a slippery pink bra with lace edges. Sometimes when they had been kissing a while she would let him unfasten the hook at the back, but he had to be careful not to tickle. She was the most ticklish person he had ever met. Things would just be getting interesting when all at once she would pull away and fall into peals of helpless laughter. Ian felt like a fool when that happened. “Oh, great. Just great,” he would say, and she would say, “It’s not my fault if your hands are cold.”
“Cold? It’s ninety-eight degrees out.”
“That’s not my fault.”
Did other girls behave like this? He would bet they didn’t. He wished she were, oh, more womanly, sometimes. More experienced. He said, “This is supposed to be a moment of romantic passion, must I remind you.” He said, “We’re not in kindergarten, here.” Once he said, “Have you ever considered wearing stockings that have seams?” But when Cicely started laughing she just couldn’t seem to stop, and all she did was shake her head and wipe the tears from her eyes.
One August afternoon, he came home from work to find a note on the hall table: Claudia in hospital, Dad and I staying with kids. At first he didn’t think much about this. Claudia was nearly always in the hospital, it seemed to him, giving birth to one baby or another. He dropped the note in the wastebasket and climbed the stairs, with the dog panting hopefully behind him. But then while he was showering, it occurred to him that Claudia couldn’t be having her baby yet. She didn’t even look very pregnant yet. He’d better call his mother and find out what was wrong.
As soon as he was dressed, he bounded back downstairs to use the phone. But on the next-to-last step he heard somebody crossing the dining room. Beastie, following close on his heels, uttered a low growl. Then Lucy appeared in the doorway. “Ian?” she said.
“Oh,” he said.
She wore a big white shirt of Danny’s and a pair of red pedal pushers, and her hair was tied back in a red bandanna. She looked about twelve years old. “Have you talked with your mom yet?” she asked him.
“No, but she left a note. What’s the matter with Claudia?”
“Oh, nothing all that serious. Just, you know, a little bleeding . . .”
Ian began studying an area slightly above her head.
“So anyway,” she said, “I thought I’d fix you some supper. Ordinarily I’d invite you to our place, but we’re going out so I brought something over. There’s potato salad, and ham, and I’ve put some peas on the stove to warm up.”
He didn’t tell her he usually ate at Cicely’s. All summer the family had tactfully left her and Danny alone, allowing them to get past the honeymoon stage, so they met only on special occasions like Bee’s birthday and the Fourth of July. Lucy must not have any notion about their day-to-day lives.
He followed her through the dining room to the kitchen, where he found Thomas and Agatha sitting in two straight-backed chairs. There was something eerie about children who kept so quiet you didn’t realize they were in the house. Thomas held a large, naked doll with a matted wig. Agatha’s hands were folded tidily on the table in front of her. They looked at Ian with no more expression than the doll wore. Ian said, “Well, hi, gang,” but neither of them answered.
He leaned against the sink and watched Lucy flitting around the kitchen. Her hair billowed halfway down her back, longer than he would have expected. She wore white sandals and her toenails were painted fire-engine red. None of the girls at school painted their nails anymore. Everyone was striving for the natural look, which all at once struck lan as homely.
He realized she must have spoken to him. She was facing him with her head cocked. “Pardon?” he asked.
“Do you want your ham cold, or heated up?”
“Oh, um, cold is fine.”
“It won’t be real fancy,” she said, opening the refrigerator. “Tomorrow if your mom’s still busy we’ll ask you to dinner. Why, you haven’t been over since I painted the living room!”
“No, I guess not,” Ian said.
She and Danny were renting a one-story house just north of Cold Spring Lane. So far they had hardly any furniture, but everything they did have was modern, modern, modern—black plastic and aluminum and glass. Bee claimed it would take some getting used to, but Ian loved it.
“Next week I start on the children’s room,” Lucy said. “I found this magazine with the best ideas! Sit down, why don’t you.”
He pulled out a chair and sat across from the children. A place had already been laid for him with the company silver and his mother’s best china. Two candlesticks from the dining room flanked a bowl of pansies. He began to feel ridiculous, like one of those rich people in cartoons who banquet all alone while a butler stands at the ready. He asked Thomas and Agatha, “Am I the only one eating?”
They gazed at him. Their eyes were a mournful shade of brown.
“How about you?” he asked Thomas’s doll. “Won’t you join me in a little collation?”
He caught Thomas’s lips twitching—a victory. A chink of a giggle escaped him. But Agatha remained unamused. “Her name is Dulcimer,” she said reprovingly.
“Dulcimer?”
“Ian doesn’t care about all that,” Lucy told them.
“She used to have clothes,” Agatha said, “but Thomas went and ruined them.”
“I did not!” Thomas shouted.
Lucy said, “Ssh,” and lit the candles.
“She used to have a dress with two pockets, but he put it in the washer and it came out bits and pieces.”
“That was the washer did that, not me!”
“Now she has to go bare, because his other dolls’ clothes are too little.”
Ian forked up a slice of ham and looked again at Dulcimer. Her body was cloth, soiled to dark gray. Her head was pink vinyl and so were her arms and her legs, which had a wide-set, spraddled appearance. “Maybe she could wear real baby clothes,” he suggested.
“Mama won’t—”
“That’s what I say, too!” Thomas burst out.
“Mama won’t let her,” Agatha continued stubbornly. There was something unswerving about her. She reminded Ian of certain grade-school teachers he had known. “Mama’s got all these baby clothes she buys at Hochschild’s, nightgowns and diapers and stuff Dulcimer would love, but Mama won’t lend them out.”
“Have some peas,” Lucy told Ian.
“Oh, thanks, I’ll just—”
“Today she bought a teeny-weeny baby hat with blue ribbons but she says if Thomas plays with it he’ll get it dirty,” Agatha said.
Ian looked over at Lucy, and Lucy looked back at him ruefully. She said, “Don’t tell the others, will you?”
“Okay.”
“I want to wait till Claudia gets out of the hospital.”
“My lips are sealed,” he said.
It was a pleasurable moment, sharing a secret with Lucy. The secret itself, though, he wasn’t so sure of. He thought of Danny circling her waist with his hands, his fingertips nearly meeting. Couldn’t he have let her stay as she was? Did everything have to keep marching forward all the time?
She said, “We ought to get going, kids.”
“Well, thanks for the food,” Ian told her.
“You’re very welcome.”
After they left he could have stopped eating—he was already late for supper at Cicely’s—but he worried Lucy would find out somehow and feel hurt. So he made his way through everything, sweating in the candlelight, which was, to tell the truth, sort of uncomfortable for August. She had laid out the ham slices in a careful, scalloped design that reminded him of the patterns etched alongside the ocean. And although it would have saddened him to let the ham go to waste, it saddened him too to finish it and end up with just the empty plate.
Claudia did manage to keep her baby. In fact, she went way past her due date. Her doctor had predicted the first week in December, but things dragged on so long that Ian started betting the baby would arrive on his birthday, January 2. “Oh, please,” Claudia said. “Let’s hope to God you’re wrong.” She was big as a house and her ankles were swollen and she’d had to have her rings cut off with a hacksaw. At Christmas she was still lumbering around, and Christmas dinner was a spectacle, with Claudia and Lucy sitting elbow to elbow in their ballooning maternity smocks. Lucy turned out to be the type who carried her baby a great distance in front of her (something to do with her small frame, perhaps), so that even though she had two months to go, she looked nearly as pregnant as Claudia. She was officially a member of the family now—the honeymoon joyfully over and done with, in the Bedloes’ eyes, the moment she announced her good news. Now they felt free to stop by her house more often and to invite her and Danny for potluck. Ian had almost reached the point where he could take her for granted. Although still when she turned her silvery gaze upon him he had an arrested feeling, a sense of a skipped beat in the atmosphere of the room.
One of the Bedloe traditions was that important dinners, on holidays and such, were not the usual boring assortment of meats and vegetables. Instead, Bee served their favorite course: hors d’oeuvres. Oh, there’d be a turkey at Thanksgiving, cakes for birthdays, but those were just a nod to convention. What mattered were the stuffed mushrooms, the runny cheeses, the spreads and dips and pâtés and shrimps on toothpicks. The family was secretly proud of this practice; they enjoyed watching guests’ reactions. Nothing humdrum about the Bedloes! That Christmas they had oysters on the half shell, and the look of horror on Lucy’s children’s faces made everybody laugh. “Never mind,” Danny told them. “You don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to.”
Danny was exuberant these days. He had researched pregnancy and childbirth as if he expected to deliver the baby himself, and he kept a long scroll of possible names scrunched in his pocket. For some strange reason, he seemed very fond of Thomas and Agatha. Well, Thomas was all right, Ian supposed. He looked kind of cute in his dapper little sailor outfit. But Agatha! Really there was only so much you could do with such a child. Her frilly pink dress made her face appear all the more wooden, and her hair stood out at her jaw in a monolithic wedge. Sometimes Ian caught her giving him one of her flat stares, reminding him of that doll that Thomas was so attached to. Dulcimer. Same numb, blank face, same unseeing eyes.
They moved to the living room and settled themselves, groaning. The cat threw up an oyster behind the couch. Barney fed cracker crumbs to the goldfish, Abbie played “The First Noel” on the piano with a rhythm as ponderous as army boots, and Doug brought out his Polaroid Land camera and took pictures of them all—each photo after the first one showing somebody holding a previous photo, admiring it or grimacing or industriously coating it with fixative. Then little Cindy, who had fallen asleep in front of the fire, woke up cranky, and the dog accidentally stepped on her and made her cry. Claudia said, “That’s our cue! Time to go!” and she heaved herself to her feet. They all departed at once—Claudia’s family and Danny’s—leaving behind a litter of torn gift wrap and mismatched mittens and oyster shells. “This was our best Christmas ever, wasn’t it?” Bee asked Doug. But she always said that.
Claudia’s baby came two days later—a girl. Frances, they named her. Ian said, “Well, I was almost right. It’s almost my birthday.”
“Cheer up,” Bee told him. “There’s always the next one.”
“Next one! Good grief.”
The next one of Claudia’s, they both meant. It never occurred to them that Lucy’s baby might arrive on his birthday. But that was what happened.
He had spent the evening at Cicely’s, where she and his friends threw him a party. When he got home he found his mother waiting up for him. “Guess what!” she said. “Lucy had her baby.”
“What, so soon?”
“A little girl: Daphne. She’s small but healthy, breathing on her own . . . Danny called about an hour ago and he was so excited he could hardly talk.”
“After this he won’t be fit to live with,” Ian said gloomily.
“And Lucy’s doing fine. Oh, won’t the neighbors tease us? They’ll be counting on their fingers, except in this case it’s obvious that . . . you want to go with me to the hospital tomorrow?”
“I have school tomorrow,” Ian said.
Besides, he had never been much interested in infants.
He didn’t see the new baby for a week, in fact, what with one thing and another. Neither did Claudia, who was stuck at home with her own baby. So on Sunday, when everyone gathered at the Bedloes’ for dinner, Danny made a big production of introducing his daughter. “Ta-da!” he trumpeted, and he entered the house bearing her high in both hands—a tiny cluster of crochet work. “Here she is, folks! Miss Daphne Bedloe.” Lucy looked paler than usual, but she laughed as she bent to unbutton Thomas’s jacket.
“Let’s see her,” Claudia commanded from the couch. She had constructed a kind of nest there and was nursing Franny. Ian had retreated to the other side of the room as soon as he saw Claudia fumbling under her blouse, and he made no move now to come closer. All newborns looked more or less alike, he figured. And this one might still be sort of . . . fetus-shaped. He hung back and dug his hands in his pockets and traced an arc in the rug with one sneaker.
But Danny said, “Don’t you want to see too, Ian?” and he sounded so hurt that Ian had to say, “Huh? Oh. Sure.” He took his hands from his pockets and approached.
Danny set her on the couch next to Claudia and started peeling off layers. First the crocheted blanket, then an inner blanket, then a bonnet. His fingers seemed too thick for the task, but finally he said, “There!” and straightened up, grinning.
What was that fairy tale? “Sleeping Beauty,” maybe, or “Snow White.” Skin as white as snow and hair as black as coal and lips as red as roses. So she was prettier than most other babies, yes, but still not all that interesting. Until she opened her eyes.
She opened her eyes and fixed Ian with a thoughtful, considering stare, and Ian felt a sudden loosening in his chest. It seemed she had reached out and pulled a string from somewhere deep inside him. It seemed she knew him. He blinked.
“Your birthday-mate,” Danny was saying. “Or birthmate, or whatever they call it. Isn’t she something?”
To regain his distance, Ian let his eyes slide over to Claudia. He found her looking directly into his face, meaningfully, narrowly. He couldn’t think what she wanted to convey; he didn’t understand her intensity. Then it came to him, as clearly as if she had spoken.
This is not a premature baby.
He was so astonished that he let his eyes slide back again, forgetting why he had glanced away in the first place. And it was true: she might be small but her cheeks were round, and her little fists were dimpled. She looked nothing like those “Life Before Birth” photos in Life magazine.
“Isn’t she a love?” Bee asked. “Two loves,” she added, blowing a kiss toward Franny. And Claudia said, “She’s a beauty, Lucy.”
Ian turned to study Claudia. She was smiling now. Her face—a younger, smoother version of Bee’s—seemed relaxed and peaceful. The hitch had been smoothed over. Not a trace of it remained. Here was their newest member, born early but in perfect health, thank God, and everything in the Bedloe family was as wonderful as always.
Well, hold on (Ian told himself). Don’t be too hasty. Daphne was no longer brand-new, after all. She’d had six whole days to catch up before he laid eyes on her. Best to put the subject right out of his mind.
But over the next few weeks it kept sidling back, somehow.
If Danny and Lucy had been going together forever, why, a seven-months baby (quote, unquote) would have been something to wink at. But they hadn’t been going together forever. Nine months ago they hadn’t even known each other. Lucy had not yet walked into the post office to plunk her famous package on Danny’s counter. She might have been dating someone else entirely.
In school last year a senior had had to get married to a girl he swore he hardly knew. Or rather, he swore everybody knew her. It was lan’s first intimation of the fix a man could find himself in. Women were the ones who held the reins, it emerged. Women were up close to things. Men stood off at one remove and were forced to accept women’s reading of whatever happened. Probably this was what lan’s father had been trying to tell him in that talk they’d had a few years ago, but Ian hadn’t fully understood it at the time.
One night he asked Cicely, “What do you think of Lucy?”
“Oh, I just love her,” Cicely said.
“Yes, but—”
“She’s always so easy to talk to; she always asks me these questions that show she’s been listening. Real questions, I mean. Not those who-cares questions most other grownups ask.”