Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [76]
Sunday afternoon the Merediths had a quarrel about when they were going home. Emily wanted to wait till Monday, but Leon wanted to leave that evening. “Lord, yes,” Morgan longed to say. “Go!”—not only to the Merediths but to everyone. They could abandon him on the beach. Fall would come and he’d be buried under drifting threads of sand and a few brown leaves blown seaward. He pictured how calm he would grow, at last. The breakers would act for him, tumbling about while he lay still. He would finally have a chance to sort himself out. It was people who disarranged his life—Louisa in her striped beach robe like a hawk-nosed Bedouin, Brindle in an old stretched swimsuit of Bonny’s that fell in vacant folds around her hunched body. He sat beneath the umbrella in his sombrero and trunks and his shoes with woolen socks. His bare chest felt itchy and sticky. He chewed a match and listened to the Merediths quarrel.
Leon said that if they left Monday, they might very well miss their show. Emily said it was only a puppet show. Leon asked how she could say only. Wasn’t it what she’d set her heart on, dragged him into, held his nose to—damn puppets with their silly grins—all these years? She said she had never held his nose to anything and, anyway, it was Leon’s business what he did with his life. She had certainly not forced him into this, she said. Then Leon jumped to his feet and went striding southward, toward town. Morgan watched after him, idly observing that Leon had developed a roll of padded flesh above the waistband of his trunks. He was a solid, weighty man now, and came down hard on his heels. Flocks of slender girls parted to let him pass. He pushed on through them, not giving them a glance.
Possibly, Billy and Priscilla were quarreling too, for they sat apart from each other and Billy drew deep circles in the sand between his feet. The women melted closer together; the men remained on the outskirts, each alone, stiff-necked. The women’s soft voices wove in with the rush of the ocean. “Look at the birds,” Emily told Gina. “Look how they circle. Look how they’re hunting for fish.”
“Or maybe they’re just cooling off their under-wings,” Louisa said.
Bonny, gazing at the horizon from behind her dark glasses, spoke in a tranquil, faraway voice. “It was here on this beach,” she said, “that I first knew I was a grownup. I had thought of myself as a girl for so long—years after I was married. I was twenty-nine, pregnant with the twins. I’d brought Amy and Jeannie to the beach to play. I saw the lifeguard look over at me and then at some spot beyond me, and I realized he hadn’t really seen me at all. His mind told him, ‘Lady. Children. Sand toys,’ and he passed on. Oh, it’s not as if I were ever the kind that boys would whistle at. It’s not as if I were used to hordes of men admiring me, even back when I was in my teens. But at least, you see, I had once been up for consideration, and now I wasn’t. I was reclassified. I felt so sad. I felt I’d had something taken away from me that I was so certain of, I hadn’t even noticed I had it. I didn’t know it would happen to me too, just to anyone else.”
Morgan noticed someone walking toward them: a man in a business suit that was made of some dull gray hammered-metal fabric. Everyone he passed stared after him for a moment. He ruffled their faces like a wind, and then they turned away again. It was Robert Roberts. Morgan said, “Brindle.” Brindle seemed to comprehend everything, just from the sound of her name. She hunched tighter on her blanket and hugged her knees and frowned, not looking. It was up to Morgan. He rose and spat his match out. “Why, Robert Roberts!” he said, and offered his hand, too soon. Robert had some distance to travel yet. He came lurching up the slope a little untidily, in order not to keep Morgan waiting. His palm was damp. His face glistened. He was a man without visible edges or angles, and his thin brown hair was parted close to the center and plastered