Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [136]
Daphne looked at him.
As a matter of fact, every word he had said was true.
“There’s something honest about her, and just … right,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone like her.”
Agatha stepped forward, then. She put both hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Congratulations, Ian,” she said.
“Me, too,” Daphne said, and she kissed his other cheek, and Thomas clamped his neck in a rough hug. “Mr. Mysterious,” he said.
Their grandfather touched Ian’s arm shyly. Ian was trying to get the grin off his face.
They started walking again. Agatha asked all about the wedding, and Doug described how Rita admired his baby-food-jar system for sorting screws. But Daphne strolled next to Stuart in silence.
She was thinking about the dream she had dreamed at Thanksgiving. It wasn’t so much a dream as a feeling—a wash of intense, deep, perfect love. She had awakened and thought, For whom? and realized it was Ian. But it was Ian back in her childhood, when he had seemed the most magnificent person on earth. She hadn’t noticed till then how pale and flawed her love had grown since. It had made her want to weep for him, and that was why, at breakfast that day, she had said she hadn’t dreamed any dreams at all.
10
Recovering from the Hearts-of-Palm Flu
She asked if he thought he might ever want children and he said, “Oh, well, maybe sometime.” She asked how long he figured they should wait and he said, “A few years, maybe? I don’t know.”
They’d been married just four months, by then. He could see his answer came as a disappointment.
But why should they rush to change things? Their lives were perfect. Simply watching her—simply sitting at the kitchen table watching her knead a loaf of bread-filled him with contentment. Her hands were so capable, and she moved with such economy. When she wiped her floury palms on the seat of her jeans, he was struck with admiration for her naturalness.
“I had been wondering about sooner,” she told him.
“Well, no need to decide this instant,” he said.
He watched her oil a baking pan, working her long, tanned fingers deftly into the corners, and he thought of a teacher he had had in seventh grade. Mrs. Arnett, her name was. Mrs. Arnett had once been his ideal woman—soft curves and sweet perfume and ivory skin. He had found any number of reasons to bicycle past her house. Her front bow window, which was curtained off day and night by cream-colored draperies, had displayed a single, pale blue urn, and somehow that urn had come to represent all his fantasies about marriage. He had imagined Mrs. Arnett greeting her husband at the door each evening, wearing not the bermudas or dull slacks his mother wore but a swirly dress the same shade of blue as the urn; and she would kiss Mr. Arnett full on the lips and lead him inside. Everything would be so focused. No distractions: no TV blaring or telephone ringing or neighbors stopping by.
Certainly no children.
You couldn’t say Ian and Rita lived that way, even now. They were still in the house on Waverly Street—partly a matter of economics, partly to keep his father company. (Daphne had a place of her own now.) His father still occupied the master bedroom, and Rita’s widowed mother was forever dropping by, and Rita’s various aunts and cousins and a whole battalion of woman friends sat permanently around the kitchen table waiting for her to pour coffee. Where would children fit into all this?
“Next birthday, I’ll be thirty,” Rita told him.
“Thirty’s young,” Ian said.
Next birthday, Ian would be forty-two.
Forty-two seemed way too old to be thinking of babies.
At the wood shop, one of the workers had a daughter smaller than his own granddaughters. He was on his second wife, a manicurist named LaRue, and LaRue had told him it wasn’t fair to deprive her of a family just because he had already had the joy of one. He had reported every detail of their arguments on the subject; and next he’d discussed the pregnancy, which seemed so new and exciting to LaRue and so old to Butch, and finally the baby herself, who cried