Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler
“You’re not serious about this,” Brian told me.
“Could you bring in our things, do you suppose?”
I set Rachel on my hip and took a tour of the house. Not that there was much to tour. There was a living room with a couch and an armchair, and the kitchen merely took up one end of it—a sink and hotplate, a table and three chairs. The bedroom held a concave double bed and an army cot and a highboy with one drawer missing. In a little cubicle off the bedroom was a toilet with a split wooden seat, its tiny pool of water a coppery color, set squarely beneath the biggest window in the house. Something about that window—the fact that it was curtainless, or the white scum on its panes—made the light passing through it seem cold and eerie. I stood staring out of it for minutes on end, although I knew I should be helping Brian. I watched the children carry things from the car, all of them ghostly behind that cloudy glass. They tottered beneath blurred objects that I could not identify, and in their midst walked Brian, stepping precisely in his narrow Italian shoes, carrying the potty chair and something pink. When they entered the house, they seemed to have just that moment become real. Like people stepping off a television screen into your living room. I heard their voices, warm and high-pitched and louder than I had expected, and then Edward started crying over a scraped shin and I went out to comfort him. I was very glad to see their faces. Their noses were pink from the fresh air and they were sniffing and puffing. “Where shall I put this?” they kept asking. “What do you want me to do with this? Where will we sleep? What will we eat?” I bent to roll Edward’s jean leg up, tilting Rachel on my hip, but Rachel was used to that and she just took a clutch of my blouse and went on smiling in her sideways position, as adaptable as any of them.
When I went out to say goodbye to Brian I could tell that he was still worried. “Well, so long!” I said. “And thanks again, Brian”—singing it out, hoping to cheer him up. But he didn’t seem to hear. “Mary. Look,” he said.
“We’re enjoying this, Brian.”
“Look. Why don’t you tell me the whole story?”
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said.
He sighed and climbed into the car. He rolled down the window to give me last-minute instructions—“There’s a phone up at the store … you can turn on the water out back beside the … call me if you …”—and I nodded and waved and smiled.
Then his car disappeared down the road, and I turned back to see my children watching me anxiously from the doorway. They were clustered at all heights, smudged from the things they had been carrying, framed by rotting wood with a great hollow blackness behind them. I have seen happier pictures in those ads appealing for aid to underprivileged children. I never thought that any children belonging to me would look that way.
From the little store up at the boatyard we bought cleaning supplies and groceries, and we all cleaned until dark but it hardly showed. Lunch was sandwiches and supper was canned spaghetti, and after supper we fell into bed. Bed: that was a problem. I put the three older ones in the double bed and Edward and Hannah at opposite ends of the couch. Rachel and I used the army cot. We didn’t even have sheets—just the blankets I had brought and one musty old quilt we found in the highboy. The children were tired enough to sleep anywhere, but I lay awake for a long time wondering what I thought I was doing. I tried to call up a picture of Jeremy. Had he missed us yet? I imagined him sitting in front of the TV in the darkened dining room, keeping silent company with the boarders. Whenever he had something to think over he would stare at the television for hours on end. Maybe he was weighing us in his mind that very minute, stacking us up, listing our faults and our virtues. Or mine, at least. Surely he didn’t need to think twice about the children. They might get on his nerves sometimes but at least they were mostly his own flesh and blood. I was the interrupter, the overwhelmer; nobody has to tell me that. I saw how he had to tear his eyes from his work when I climbed the stairs to ask him could he babysit while I went to a kindergarten conference? Would he feed Hannah while I took Edward to the doctor? did he happen to have change for the diaper man? I knew those things weren’t as important as his sculptures, but what did he expect me to do? This is what comes with having children. You don’t just tie off their little navel cords and toss them on their way like balloons. You have to start thinking about adenoids and zinc ointment and the proper schooling, you worry about nutrition and germs, money begins to matter suddenly. Oh, hear how shrill my voice gets. Imagine what it would be like to be interrupted by such a voice just as you were conceiving your finest statue. As for my overwhelming him! Did he think I didn’t know? I never spoke to him without a sense of holding myself in check, trying to keep the reins in. I didn’t want to dominate. When I talked to him with big, wide gestures, with power and energy flooding out of me, I saw how he quailed and then made himself stand firm. He was wishing that I would shrink a little. He never guessed that I already had shrunk, that this was as small as I could get.
I sent him messages through the dark : Come and get us. Call Brian, call the boatyard. Make up some excuse for missing your wedding, anything at all, I’ll believe it: you suffered a stroke or amnesia, you were mugged in the studio, you would never have simply decided that you didn’t want to marry me. I thought up ways that he might get in touch with us. I pictured the storekeeper banging on our door—“Lady? Man up there on the telephone, says it’s urgent, life or death.” Or he might come in person. No. Never. But couldn’t he, just this once? He wouldn’t bang. His knock would be so soft I would wonder if I had imagined it. I would open the door and find him waiting, hidden in the dark, recognizable only by the dear, sad hopefulness in his stance and that hesitant breath he always took before moving toward me. For that moment I would give up anything, half the years of my life even, anything but the children. I made a hundred silent promises, but the night just went trailing on and on and the only sound I heard was the murmuring of the baby in the crook of my arm.
We finished shoveling the dirt out. We scrubbed the floor and dusted the furniture, we replaced the broken steps with cinder-blocks that Abbie found down by the water. Darcy washed the kitchen cupboards and the mismatched dishes she found stacked in them, and scoured the sink. The little ones polished the windows, their favorite job. I taped cardboard patches over the broken panes. We tore down the curtains and the great meshy spiderwebs, we ripped the tacked-on oilcloth off the table and the draggled calico skirt off the sink. From the boatyard store we bought brighter lightbulbs, a bucket of disinfectant, a flashlight for walks in that deep, country dark that is so startling after a life in the city, and finally—three days later, when I stopped thinking we might be leaving at any minute—aluminum cots for the children to sleep on and more blankets to cover them with. The store had no pillows except the life-preserving kind. My children have always slept on pillows. “Never mind,” I told them, “this way is good for the spine. You’ll be healthier.” Not that health seemed to be any problem. They worked hard every day fixing up the house, as if it were a game; they ate enormous meals and slept like rocks every night—pillowless and sheetless, crackling about on the red vinyl pads that came with the cots. I wondered what I would do with them if we had to stay here so long it stopped being a novelty. Should I put them in the local school? But it was so close to the end of the year by now—nearly May. The weather was getting warmer. We peeled off some of the layers of clothing we’d been wearing day and night. And as we slacked up work on the house the children simply took to the outdoors. They lugged Rachel with them through the tall grass and pestered the boatmen and hung around the docks. They weren’t allowed to touch the water, even—it was foul and filmed with grease. “What about summer?” Pippi asked me. “Won’t we get to go swimming?” I said, “Of course not. I’ll get you a wading pool, if it’s hot.”
Summer! Would we still be here when summer came?
Brian stopped by almost every day. I told him not to but he said he had to come anyway—he had his boat moored out on the river,
The only time he mentioned Jeremy was once during the first week, when it was still cold. I remember the cold because he asked me to step outside with him a minute, away from the children, just as he was leaving. I came in my sweater, with my arms folded across my chest for warmth, and he said, “Not like that, get a coat. I’ll wait.” Then out beside his car he said, “Mary, I feel I’m in an awkward position here.”
“Do you want me to leave?” I asked.
What would I have done if he’d said yes?
But what he said was, “No, of course not, but I’d like to know what you expect of me. Am I supposed to be keeping your whereabouts a secret? Because if I am, now—”
“Oh no,” I said. “Jeremy knows where I am.”
“I wasn’t sure that he did.”
“He knows. I told him, I wrote him a note.”
Then I thought, Suppose he never saw the note. Is that why I haven’t heard from him? I said, “Did he say he doesn’t know my whereabouts? Have you seen him? Did he ask you?”
“I saw him, yes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even seem to want to mention your going.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, you can tell him, Brian.”
“Of course I wouldn’t bring the subject up myself. But if he asked, you see, I felt that I was in an awkward—”
“Bring it up, I don’t mind. Tell him, It isn’t as if this were a fight or anything.”
“What is it, then?”
I pulled my coat tighter against a breeze.
“I don’t want to pry,” Brian said, “but is this something permanent you are doing?”
I didn’t answer. I had questions of my own. I wanted to know how Jeremy had looked and whether he was getting enough rest and eating right. (He was always so fond of sweets and he didn’t like meat.) But I knew those were housewifely questions that would make Brian smile, and anyway he wouldn’t have been able to tell me. Oh, sometimes I think of other artists’ wives, people that Brian must run into all the time. I picture them fragile and blond and hollow-cheeked, the kind that model in the nude and lead unscheduled lives in garrets and never, never complicate things with children and plumbers. When I used to come clumping into the gallery every month, wearing my nursing bra and my best black dress with the spit-up milk down one shoulder, I imagined that Brian looked stunned. He would stare at me, and if he happened to be talking with other women they would hush and stare too. I suspected that they were feeling sorry for Jeremy. “An artist—married to her?” Then I would pull my stomach in and stuff the straggles of hair back behind my ears, and when I was looking at paintings I spent longer before each one than I wanted to, just showing I could appreciate art. I wouldn’t have been caught dead mentioning anything domestic. And now all I allowed myself to say was, “I hope he’s making out all right.”
“Oh, you know Jeremy,” Brian said. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. He smiled down at me and said, “Don’t worry, Mary. I’m sorry I brought it up. Go back inside now before you catch a cold.”
The next time he came he didn’t mention Jeremy at all, and I was afraid to ask.
Now more and more boats were tethered at the docks and bobbing on moorings. Weekdays, when not many people sailed, I could look out over a stretch of black water prickling with masts, and I liked to pretend that I was some fisherman’s wife living in a hut at the edge of the ocean. The river did have the feeling of an ocean. There was no opposite shore in sight; from this boatyard you sailed due east into the Chesapeake Bay, which looked like white veils at the limits of our vision. Late Friday afternoon the city people would begin to arrive from Baltimore and Washington—couples dressed for yachting, carrying ice buckets and windbreakers and Hudson Bay blankets. My children would crowd along the dock to stare at them. We saw their sails scudding away all Saturday, converging on us again all Sunday evening like birds flocking home. While we ate our supper doors would be slamming in the parking lot, motors revving, voices calling goodbyes. By Monday morning all that remained were their tire tracks in the gravel and those naked masts lined up again beside the docks. A few people drove in during the week to sail on their own or make minor repairs, but they were quieter and the only time I was aware of them was when I ran into them at the store. Then their solid, confident city voices startled me, and I would stand gawking like any country woman as they read off their long extravagant lists. Ice, they wanted, and a Phillips screwdriver and a can of rust remover and a sack of potato chips. Luxuries, every one. We took our food unchilled, or bought it from the store refrigerator just before time to eat; our tools we borrowed from neighbors or made ourselves from scraps; we stripped that everlasting salt-air rust off them with the Coca-Cola left in discarded cans. As for potato chips! I made the children eat protein foods instead. I have never liked being stingy with food but what else could I do? I fed them lots of eggs and cottage cheese and powdered milk. I gave the baby bits from my plate. Gerber’s was too expensive. Even doing the laundry was expensive. Once a week I carried the dirtiest things to the store washing machine and dropped my quarter in the slot and sprinkled on the detergent, rationing every grain. I lugged the clothes home wet and hung them up to save fifty cents, even if it was rainy and I had to drape the living room with them and bat my way between damp blue jeans for a day and a half till they dried. Then here came this city man with his list so long that it filled two separate pages of his memo pad, not to mention what he idly tossed in from the counter displays as he wandered about the store whistling through his teeth. I doubt if he noticed me. If he did he probably thought I came from one of those shacks beside the store, where the boat mechanic lived or the carpenter or the old retired steelworker and his daughter. Poor white trash with dusty paper flowers before the madonnas on their windowsills and cotton balls on their screen doors to keep the flies away. That was what I had become. My children ran in and out between counters with their faces dirty and their dresses unironed, their feet bare and callused even before the summer had set in.
When Brian came he almost always offered to take us sailing, unless he had brought a girl along or a group of his friends. I was afraid he felt he had to offer. “Brian’s here! Brian’s here!” the children shouted when they saw his car, and I would say, “Stop, now! Hush. I want you to stay in here with me.” They couldn’t understand that. They always crowded around the windows and cheered when he knocked. To make up for them I kept my back to the door and was slow answering and pretended to be surprised when I saw him. “Just stopped by to see what you were doing,” he would say, and usually hand me something—a little patterned rug he had been keeping in storage, towels he said were cluttering up his apartment, most often a sack of some kind of candy for the children. “How about it, kids?” he would say. “Feel like a sail?” He said he needed the help on deck. I didn’t believe him. I was afraid he felt responsible for us in some way. I didn’t want to say no to the children—what other treats did they have?—but usually I stayed home myself and kept the baby. I only went sailing twice all spring. The first time was the first sail I had had in all my life, and I didn’t think much of it. I don’t like to be floated to places, willy-nilly. But I stood on the deck with Rachel on one hip, pretending to enjoy myself, and he didn’t keep us out too long. The second time was unplanned. It was in July, after several days of rain. He came late one afternoon when the little ones were off playing somewhere. “I wanted to see if you’d do me a favor,” he told me. “Oh, anything!” I said. I was so glad to have him asking me for something.
“After rainy spells, if I don’t have a chance to get down here myself, would you row out to the boat and dry my sails for me?”
“Do what?”
“Come out; I’ll show you.”
So we left the baby with Da
“You mean right now?”
“Why not?”
“But it’s—now it’s almost evening,” I said.
“We won’t be long.”
“All right,” I said. I was getting nervous. I felt fairly sure that he wanted to talk about Jeremy. Why else take me away from the children, and suggest a sail in that artificial voice that meant it wasn’t so spur-of-the-moment after all? I wondered if Jeremy had fallen ill, or died, or found somebody else. I felt my hands growing cold, but I didn’t tell Brian to break the news because I was too scared. I just sat there freezing to death on a warm summer afternoon, and Brian started the motor and steered us slowly out past the other moored boats.
When we reached open water he cut the engine. The quiet rolled down over us like a bolt of silk. I could hear water lapping, ropes creaking, Brian doing something complicated to tighten the sails. Oh, everything was so unfamiliar! I felt that this entire scene was foreign and bizarre, some trumped-up substitute for the world where Jeremy lived. Every move that Brian made, even the tone of his voice and the way his beard ruffled and parted in the wind, was makeshift; nothing like Jeremy at all. When he came to sit down beside me the sheen in the unknown fabric of his shirt made me want to go home. He laid an arm across my back and his hand rested on my shoulder—a big, wiry hand, as unlike Jeremy’s as a hand can get. Now, I thought, is when he will say it. They shield you and brace you before they tell you, as if the blow they are about to deal is a physical one. I knew all about it. (Don’t ask me how.) I swallowed and waited, and hoped that he wouldn’t feel me shudder when he started talking.