“Willa,” he said, “it’s Peter.” He spoke so sharply that she had to move the phone an inch or two farther away. “Tomorrow I’m tied up. I do have a life, after all, whether or not you’re aware of it. So you know what, Willa? You’ll just have to find your own way home. Bye.”
There was a click.
Willa lowered her phone and looked at the screen.
It was not quite five thirty, she saw. In Tucson it would be night still. But she called him back even so, because she knew he turned his phone off before he went to bed. She listened through several rings until his voice came on, smooth and cordial now, suggesting that she leave a message. “Please speak slowly and distinctly,” he instructed, speaking slowly and distinctly himself as if to demonstrate.
“Hi, honey,” she said, “it’s me. I’m sorry I didn’t think to ask if you’d be busy. I’ll just grab myself a taxi, no trouble at all, and see you at the house later. Love you!”
Then she tucked her phone back in her purse and reached for her suitcase and set off to find a cup of coffee.
Something about the way her suitcase trundled behind her brought to mind the oxygen tanks that heart patients dragged around.
* * *
—
On the plane she had a middle seat, but neither of her fellow passengers seemed likely to be any trouble. The man by the window wore one of those puffy neck pillows that made her think of a cushion with a severed head on top, and he went promptly to sleep as soon as they were in the air. The woman on the aisle—gray-haired and plump, although not so plump as to require more than her fair share of space—merely gave Willa a smile and opened a handicrafts magazine. Willa wouldn’t have to worry about getting a crick in her neck from talking with anyone next to her.
For a while she gazed out the window at the countryside shrinking below, the miniature rooftops forming segmented lines that resembled centipedes. But then the view changed to nothing but white—not individual clouds but unremitting blankness—and so she took out the paperback mystery that she had started on the way to Baltimore. She had to start it all over again because she’d forgotten the beginning. It was full of meaningful-sounding details that she should probably pay close attention to, but this struck her as a lot of work. After a few chapters her lids began to droop, and finally she closed her eyes and let her head tip back.
She had assumed she wouldn’t sleep. She seldom did when she traveled. But all at once she found herself in a city that she knew to be foreign, with cobblestone streets and ancient, moss-covered buildings. Ahead of her a child was walking alone, a little girl in a gingham dress. Willa felt that this child would be very happy to learn Willa was behind her, and so she opened her mouth to call her but all that emerged was a broken high note, an ee-ee-ee sound that woke her up. Her own squeaky voice was still ringing in her ears. Mercifully, the woman next to her hadn’t noticed; or maybe she was just being tactful.
Willa briefly closed her eyes again, but she had lost the dream for good.
She must have slept longer than she’d realized, because the woman next to her was sipping from a glass of ice water. Evidently the flight attendants had passed through at some point with their cart. Willa sat forward to see where the cart was now—she supposed she ought to stay hydrated—but it was nowhere to be seen and anyhow, she wasn’t thirsty. She sat back and listened to a couple behind her arguing about whether someone named Dink should get his allowance even when he didn’t make his bed. “All the books say a child’s allowance shouldn’t depend on his doing his chores,” the wife announced, and the husband gave some response that Willa couldn’t hear. The wife must not have heard either, because she said “What was that?” and the husband said, loudly, “Hogwash.”
Willa’s seatmate stuffed her paper napkin into her empty glass and stood up with it and headed toward the rear of the plane. Willa waited a minute or so before she stood up herself; she didn’t want to look like a copycat, but she liked to schedule her restroom trips for when she wouldn’t have to dislodge anyone.
When she got back, of course, the woman did have to be dislodged, because she had gotten back first, but at least she was expecting it and hadn’t refastened her seat belt.
The man by the window was still asleep. Willa was always amazed when people made it through a long flight without a bathroom break.
By now she had reached the point where she felt the trip would never end. She didn’t think she could bear another minute of droning engines, canned dead air, young men in suits discussing “asks” and “reaching out” and “taking a meeting.” She imagined ringing for a flight attendant and announcing, in a pleasant voice, “I’d like to get off now, please. If you would be so kind as to fetch me a parachute, I’ll just be on my way.”
But this mood passed, eventually, and she closed her eyes and fell into the kind of half-sleep where she never lost her awareness of her own tensed, furrowed forehead.
At long, long last she felt a barely perceptible change in altitude, a shift in the sound of the engines, and she sat up and looked out the window and saw the sand-colored landscape of Arizona below. It wasn’t her landscape, not her natural landscape; but it would do.
The instant the plane touched down, all the passengers switched their phones on. Everywhere around her Willa heard dings and tweets and chimes. She checked her own phone, just in case Peter had changed his mind and left another message. But she had no new calls, and no e-mails or texts, either, although she waited several minutes with her eyes fixed on the screen to make sure. Nothing.
This wasn’t a disappointment, she found. Instead she felt a distinct sense of…gratification, she would have to call it.
She lowered the phone and stared at the seat back in front of her.
* * *
—
When she stepped into the terminal, she had the illusion that everyone here had been frozen in position all the weeks she’d been gone. Those rumpled, tired-looking mothers with their fractious babies, those elderly couples in mammoth jogging shoes, those businessmen with their laptop cases slung across their chests…they could have been painted here. They looked as settled in as dollhouse dolls.
She walked past the rows of burnt-orange chairs with their indolently slanting backs. She walked past the white-lit shops displaying chocolates and electronics. She reached the moving staircase that led down to the airport exit, and the people in front of her stepped onto it one after another, but at the very last minute Willa veered to one side, nearly tripping a young boy bent beneath an oversize backpack. “Sorry,” she murmured, and she looked around for the ticket counters.
* * *
—
In her new life, she will rent a room somewhere. Or she will live in Mrs. Minton’s house, or find herself an apartment with a swimming pool Cheryl can visit. She will teach English to Ben’s refugees, or Spanish to Cheryl’s classmates. Or she might try something new that she hasn’t even imagined yet. There is no limit to the possibilities.
She sees herself as a tiny skirted figure like the silhouette on a ladies’ room door, skimming the curve of the earth as it sails through space.
END
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. She is the author of more than twenty novels. Her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Anne Tyler, Clock Dance
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