“Oh, um, I’d like you to meet Muriel Pritchett. And Alexander, her son.”
“Really?”
A politely inquisitive look remained on her face. Evidently no one had filled her in. (Or else she hadn’t bothered to listen.) “Well, since I seem to be the maître d’,” she said, “I’ll show you out back where the bride and groom are.”
“Rose is not in hiding?”
“No, she says she doesn’t see the logic in missing her own wedding,” Alicia said, leading them toward the rear of the house. “Muriel, have you known Macon long?”
“Oh, kind of.”
“He’s very stuffy,” Alicia said confidingly. “All my children are. They get it from the Leary side.”
“I think he’s nice,” Muriel said.
“Oh, nice, yes. All very well and good,” Alicia said, throwing Macon a look he couldn’t read. She had linked arms with Muriel; she was always so physical. The trim on her caftan nearly matched Muriel’s shawl. Macon had a sudden appalling thought: Maybe in his middle age he was starting to choose his mother’s style of person, as if concluding that Alicia—silly, vain, annoying woman— might have the right answers after all. But no. He put the thought away from him. And Muriel slipped free of Alicia’s arm. “Alexander? Coming?” she asked.
They stepped through the double doors of the sun porch. The backyard was full of pastels—Rose’s old ladies in pale dresses, daffodils set everywhere in buckets, forsythia in full bloom along the alley. Dr. Grauer, Rose’s minister, stepped forward and shook Macon’s hand. “Aha! The best man,” he said, and behind him came Julian in black—not his color. His nose was peeling. It must be boating season again. He put a gold ring in Macon’s palm and said, “Like for you to have this.” For a moment Macon imagined he was really meant to have it. Then he said, “Oh, yes, the ring,” and dropped it in his pocket.
“I can’t believe I’m finally getting a son-in-law,” Alicia told Julian. “All I’ve ever had is daughter-in-laws.”
“Daughters,” Macon said automatically.
“No, daughter-in-laws.”
“Daughters-in-law, Mother.”
“And didn’t manage to keep them long, either,” Alicia said.
When Macon was small, he used to worry that his mother was teaching him the wrong names for things. “They call this corduroy,” she’d said, buttoning his new coat, and he had thought, But do they really? Funny word, in fact, corduroy. Very suspicious. How could he be sure that other people weren’t speaking a whole different language out there? He’d examined his mother distrustfully— her foolish fluff of curls and her flickery, unsteady eyes.
Now here came Porter’s children, the three of them sticking close together; and behind them June, their mother. Wasn’t it unusual to invite your brother’s ex-wife to your wedding? Particularly when she was big as a barn with another man’s baby. But she seemed to be enjoying herself. She pecked Macon on the cheek and cocked her head appraisingly at Muriel. “Kids, this is Alexander,” Macon said. He was hoping against hope that they’d all just fall in together somehow and be friends, which of course didn’t happen. Porter’s children eyed Alexander sullenly and said nothing. Alexander knotted his fists in his pockets. June told Julian, “Your bride is looking just radiant,” and Julian said, “Yes, isn’t she,” but when Macon located Rose he thought she looked tense and frayed, as most brides do if people would only admit it. She wore a white dress, mid-calf length but very simple, and a little puff of lace or net or something on her head. She was talking to their hardware man. And yes, there was the girl who cashed their checks at the Mercantile Bank, and over next to Charles was the family dentist. Macon thought of Mary Poppins—those late-night adventures he used to read to Ethan, where all the tradespeople showed up behaving nothing like their daytime selves.
“I’m not sure if there’s been any research on this,” Charles was telling the dentist, “but have you ever tried polishing your teeth with a T-shirt after flossing?”
“Er . . .”
“A plain cotton T-shirt. One hundred percent cotton. I think you’re going to be impressed when I have my next checkup. See, my theory is—”
Muriel and June were discussing Caesareans. Julian was asking Alicia if she’d ever sailed the Intracoastal Waterway. Mrs. Barrett was telling the mailman that Leary Metals used to make the handsomest stamped tin ceilings in Baltimore.
And Sarah was talking to Macon about the weather.
“Yes, I worried when it rained last night,” Macon said. Or he said something; something or other . . .
He was looking at Sarah. Really he was consuming her: her burnished curls and her round, sweet face, and the dusting of powder on the down along her jawline.
“How have you been, Macon?” she asked him.
“I’ve been all right.”
“Are you pleased about the wedding?”
“Well,” he said, “I am if Rose is, I guess. Though I can’t help feeling . . . well, Julian. You know.”
“Yes, I know. But there’s more to him than you think. He might be a very good choice.”
When she stood in this kind of sunlight her eyes were so clear that it seemed you could see to the backs of them. He knew that from long ago. They might have been his own eyes; they were so familiar. He said, “How have you been?”
“I’ve been fine.”
“Well. Good.”
“I know that you’re living with someone,” she told him in a steady voice.
“Ah, yes, actually I . . . yes, I am.”
She knew who it was, too, because she looked past him then at Muriel and Alexander. But all she said was, “Rose told me when she invited me.”
He said, “How about you?”
“Me?”
“Are you living with anyone?”
“Not really.”
Rose came over and touched their arms, which was unlike her. “We’re ready now,” she said. She told Macon, “Sarah’s my matron of honor, did I happen to mention that?”
“No, you didn’t,” Macon said.
Then he and Sarah followed her to a spot beneath a tulip tree, where Julian and Dr. Grauer were waiting. There was some kind of makeshift altar there—some little table or something covered with a cloth; Macon didn’t pay much attention. He stood beside the minister and fingered the ring in his pocket. Sarah stood across from him, looking gravely into his face.
It all felt so natural.
seventeen
Muriel said, “I never told you this, but a while before I met you I was dating somebody else.”
“Oh? Who was that?” Macon asked.
“He was a customer at the Rapid-Eze Copy Center. He brought me his divorce papers to copy and we started having this conversation and ended up going out together. His divorce was awful. Really messy. His wife had been two-timing him. He said he didn’t think he could ever trust a woman again. It was months before he would spend the night, even; he didn’t like going to sleep when a woman was in the same room. But bit by bit I changed all that. He relaxed. He got to be a whole different man. Moved in with me and took over the bills, paid off all I still owed. Alexander’s doctor. We started talking about getting married. Then he met an airline stewardess and eloped with her within the week.”
“I see,” Macon said.
“It was like I had, you know, cured him, just so he could elope with another woman.”
“Well,” he said.
“You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you, Macon?”
“Who, me?”
“Would you elope with someone else? Would you see someone else behind my back?”
“Oh, Muriel, of course not,” he told her.
“Would you leave me and go home to your wife?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Would you?”
“Don’t be silly,” he said.
She cocked her head and considered him. Her eyes were alert and bright and knowing, like the eyes of some small animal.
&
nbsp; It was a rainy Tuesday morning and Edward, who was squeamish about rain, insisted he didn’t need to go out, but Macon took him anyway. While he was waiting in the backyard beneath his umbrella, he saw a young couple walking down the alley. They caught his attention because they walked so slowly, as if they didn’t realize they were getting wet. The boy was tall and frail, in ragged jeans and a soft white shirt. The girl wore a flat straw hat with ribbons down the back and a longish limp cotton dress. They swung hands, looking only at each other. They came upon a tricycle and they separated to walk around it; only instead of simply walking the girl did a little sort of dance step, spinning her skirt out, and the boy spun too and laughed and took her hand again.
Edward finally, finally peed, and Macon followed him back into the house. He set his umbrella in the kitchen sink and squatted to dry Edward off with an old beach towel. He rubbed briskly at first, and then more slowly. Then he stopped but remained on the floor, the towel bunched in his hands, the tin-can smell of wet dog rising all around him.
When he’d asked Sarah whether she was living with anyone, and Sarah had said, “Not really,” what exactly had she meant by that?
The rain stopped and they put Edward on his leash and went out shopping. Muriel needed bedroom slippers with feathers on them. “Red. High-heeled. Pointy-toed,” she said.
“Goodness. Whatever for?” Macon asked her.
“I want to clop around the house in them on Sunday mornings. Can’t you just see it? I wish I smoked cigarettes. I wish Alexander wasn’t allergic to smoke.”
Yes, he could see it, as a matter of fact. “In your black-and-gold kimono,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“But I don’t believe they sell those feathered slippers anymore.”
“In thrift shops they do.”
“Oh. Right.”
Lately, Macon had begun to like thrift shops himself. In the usual sea of plastic he had found, so far, a folding boxwood carpenter’s rule, an ingenious wheeled cookie cutter that left no waste space between cookies, and a miniature brass level for Alexander’s toolbox.
The air outside was warm and watery. Mrs. Butler was propping up the squashed geraniums that flopped in the white-washed tire in her yard. Mrs. Patel—out of her luminous sari for once, clumsy and unromantic in tight, bulgy Calvin Klein jeans—was sweeping the puddles off her front steps. And Mrs. Saddler stood in front of the hardware store waiting for it to open. “I don’t guess you’d have seen Dominick,” she said to Muriel.
“Not lately.”
“Last night he never came home,” Mrs. Saddler said. “That boy just worries the daylights out of me. He’s not what you would call bad,” she told Macon, “but he’s worrisome, know what I mean? When he’s at home he’s so much at home, those big noisy boots all over the place, but then when he’s away he’s so much away. You wouldn’t believe how the house feels; just empty. Just echoing.”
“He’ll be back,” Muriel said. “Tonight’s his turn to have the car.”
“Oh, and when he’s out with the car it’s worst of all,” Mrs. Saddler said. “Then every siren I hear, I wonder if it’s Dommie. I know how he screeches round corners! I know those fast girls he goes out with!”
They left her still standing there, distractedly fingering her coin purse, although the hardware-store owner had unlocked his door by now and was cranking down his awnings.
Outside a shop called Re-Runs, they ordered Edward to stay. He obeyed, looking put upon, while they went in. Muriel sifted through stacks of curled, brittle shoes that had hardened into the shapes of other people’s feet. She shucked off her own shoes and stepped into a pair of silver evening sandals. “What do you think?” she asked Macon.
“I thought you were looking for slippers.”
“But what do you think of these?”
“I can live without them,” he said.
He was feeling bored because Re-Runs carried nothing but clothes.
Muriel abandoned the shoes and they went next door to Garage Sale Incorporated. Macon tried to invent a need for a rusty metal Rolodex file he found in a heap of tire chains. Could he use it for his guidebooks in some way? And make it tax-deductible. Muriel picked up a tan vinyl suitcase with rounded edges; it reminded Macon of a partly sucked caramel. “Should I get this?” she asked.
“I thought you wanted slippers.”
“But for travel.”
“Since when do you travel?”
“I know where you’re going next,” she said. She came closer to him, both hands clutching the suitcase handle. She looked like a very young girl at a bus stop, say, or out hitching a ride on the highway. “I wanted to ask if I could come with you.”
“To Canada.”
“I mean the next place after that. France.”
He set down the Rolodex. (Mention of France always depressed him.)
“Julian said!” she reminded him. “He said it’s getting to be time to go to France again.”
“You know I can’t afford to bring you.”
Muriel replaced the suitcase and they left the shop. “But just this once,” she said, hurrying along beside him. “It wouldn’t cost much!”
Macon retrieved Edward’s leash and motioned him up. “It would cost a mint,” he said, “not to mention that you’d have to miss work.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I’ve quit.”
He looked over at her. “Quit?”
“Well, at the Meow-Bow. Then things like George and the dog training I’ll just rearrange; if I was to travel I could just—”
“You quit the Meow-Bow?”
“So what?”
He couldn’t explain the sudden weight that fell on him.
“It’s not like it really paid much,” Muriel said. “And you do buy most of the groceries now and help me with the rent and all; it’s not like I needed the money. Besides, it took so much time! Time I could spend with you and Alexander! Why, I was coming home nights literally dead with exhaustion, Macon.”
They passed Methylene’s Beauty Salon, an insurance agency, a paint-stripping shop. Edward gave an interested glance at a large, jowly tomcat basking on the hood of a pickup.
“Figuratively,” Macon said.
“Huh?”
“You were figuratively dead with exhaustion. Jesus, Muriel, you’re so imprecise. You’re so sloppy. And how could you quit your job like that? How could you just assume like that? You never even warned me!”
“Oh, don’t make such a big deal about it,” Muriel said.
They arrived at her favorite shop—a nameless little hole in the wall with a tumble of dusty hats in the window. Muriel started through the door but Macon stayed where he was. “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked him.
“I’ll wait here.”
“But it’s the place with all the gadgets!”
He said nothing. She sighed and disappeared.
Seeing her go was like shucking off a great, dragging burden.
He squatted to scratch behind Edward’s ears, and then he rose and studied a sun-bleached election poster as if it held some fascinating coded message. Two black women passed him, pulling wire carts full of laundry. “It was just as warm as this selfsame day I’m speaking to you but she wore a very very fur coat . . .”
“May-con.”
He turned toward the door of the shop.
“Oh, Maay-con!”
He saw a mitten, one of those children’s mittens designed to look like a puppet. The palm was a red felt mouth that widened to squeak, “Macon, please don’t be angry with Muriel.”
Macon groaned.
“Come into this nice store with her,” the puppet urged.
“Muriel, I think Edward’s getting restless now.”
“There’s lots of things to buy here! Pliers and wrenches and T-squares . . . There’s a silent hammer.”
“What?”
“A hammer that doesn’t make a sound. You can pound in nails in the dead of night.”
“Listen—” Macon
said.
“There’s a magnifying glass all cracked and broken, and when you look at broken things through the lens you’d swear they’d turned whole again.”
“Really, Muriel.”
“I’m not Muriel! I’m Mitchell Mitten! Macon, don’t you know Muriel can always take care of herself?” the puppet asked him. “Don’t you know she could find another job tomorrow, if she wanted? So come inside! Come along! There’s a pocket-knife here with its own whetstone blade.”
“Oh, for Lord’s sake,” Macon said.
But he gave a grudging little laugh.
And went on inside.
Over the next few days she kept bringing up France again and again. She sent him an anonymous letter pasted together from magazine print: Don’t FoRget tO BUY plANe Ticket for MuRiel. (And the telltale magazine—with little blocks clipped out of its pages—still lay on the kitchen table.) She asked him to get her her keys from her purse and when he opened her purse he found photographs, two slick colored squares on thin paper showing Muriel’s eyes at half mast. Passport photos, plainly. She must have meant for him to see them; she was watching him so intently. But all he did was drop her keys in her palm without comment.
He had to admire her. Had he ever known such a fighter? He went grocery shopping with her unusually late one evening, and just as they were crossing a shadowed area a boy stepped forth from a doorway. “Give over all what you have in your purse,” he told Muriel. Macon was caught off guard; the boy was hardly more than a child. He froze, hugging the sack of groceries. But Muriel said, “The hell I will!” and swung her purse around by its strap and clipped the boy in the jaw. He lifted a hand to his face. “You get on home this instant or you’ll be sorry you were ever born,” Muriel told him. He slunk away, looking back at her with a puzzled expression.