Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [21]
“He was not only in fifth grade,” said Brindle, “he was also in fourth, third, second … We used to have to share our reading-skills workbook; he was always losing his. In kindergarten we went shopping once at Bargain Billy’s and he stuck a label on my cheek reading SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT. He also took me to my first school dance and my first car-date and my senior-class picnic.”
Morgan sighed and tipped his chair back. Bonny helped herself to more salad.
“Then in college I broke it off,” Brindle told Coquette. “I gave him back his high-school ring with the candle wax still in it to make it fit my finger—half a candle’s worth, it looked like. I’d probably have drowned if I ever wore it swimming.”
“Why’d you break it off?” Coquette asked her.
“I got married to someone else.”
“But why’d you break it off? I mean, why marry someone else?”
Brindle pushed her plate away and set her elbows on the table. She said, “Well, I don’t know if … When I talk about him, it sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But see, even back in kindergarten he would sometimes act silly and sometimes bore me, and yet other times I was crazy about him, and when we grew up it got worse. Sometimes I liked him and sometimes I didn’t like him, and sometimes I didn’t even think of him. And sometimes he didn’t like me, I knew it; we knew each other so well. It never occurred to me it would be that way with anyone. I mean, he was my only experience. You understand what I’m trying to say?”
Plainly, Coquette didn’t understand a word. She was growing restless, glancing toward the plate of Oreos on the sideboard. But Brindle didn’t see that. “What I did,” she said, “was marry an older man. Man who lived next door to Mother’s old house, downtown. It was a terrible mistake. He was the jealous type, possessive, always fearing I would leave him. He never gave me any money, only charge accounts and then this teeny bit of cash for the groceries every week. For seven years I charged our food at the gourmet sections of department stores—tiny cans of ham and pure-white asparagus spears and artichoke bottoms and hearts of palm, all so I could save back some of the grocery money. I would charge a dozen skeins of yarn and then return them one by one to the Knitter’s Refund counter for cash. I subscribed to every cents-off, money-back offer that came along. At the end of seven years I said, ‘All right, Horace, I’ve saved up five thousand dollars of my own. I’m leaving.’ And I left.”
“She had to save five thousand dollars,” Morgan told the ceiling, “to catch a city bus from her house to my house. Three and a half miles—four at the most.”
“I felt I’d been challenged,” Brindle said.
“And it’s not as if I hadn’t offered to help her out, all along.”
“I felt I wanted to show him, ‘See there? You can’t overcome me so easily; I’ve got more spirit than you think,’ ” Brindle said.
Morgan wondered if supplies of spirit were rationed. Did each person only get so much, which couldn’t be replenished once it was used up? For in the four years since leaving her husband she’d stayed plopped on Morgan’s third floor, seldom dressing in anything but her faded lavender bathrobe. To this day, she’d never mentioned finding a job or an apartment of her own. And when her husband died of a stroke, not six months after she’d left, she hardly seemed to care one way or the other. “Oh, well,” was all she’d said, “I suppose this saves me a trip to Nero.”
“Don’t you mean Reno?” Morgan had asked.
“Whatever,” she said.
The only time she showed any spirit, in fact, was when she was telling this story. Her eyes grew triangular; her skin had a stretched look. “I haven’t had an easy time of it, you see,” she said. “It all worked out so badly. And Robert Roberts, well, I hear he went and married a Gaithersburg girl. I just turn my back on him for a second and off he goes and gets married. Isn’t that something? Not that I hold him to blame. I know I did it to myself. I’ve ruined my life, all on my own, and it’s far too late to change it. I just set all the switches and did all the steering and headed