The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [103]
On Singleton Street, crocuses were poking through the hard squares of dirt in front of basement windows. Rugs and bedspreads flapped in backyards. A whole cache of babies had surfaced. They cruised imperiously in their strollers, propelled by their mothers or by pairs of grandmothers. Old people sat out on the sidewalk in beach chairs and wheelchairs, and groups of men stood about on corners, their hands in their pockets and their posture elaborately casual—the unemployed, Macon imagined, emerging from the darkened living rooms where they’d spent the winter watching T V. He caught snatches of their conversation:
“What’s going down, man?”
“Nothing much.”
“What you been up to?”
“Not a whole lot.”
He parked in front of Muriel’s house, where Dominick Saddler was working on Muriel’s car. The hood was open and Dominick was deep in its innards; all Macon saw was his jeans and his gigantic, ragged sneakers, a band of bare flesh showing above his cowhide belt. On either side of him stood the Butler twins, talking away a mile a minute. “So she says to us we’re grounded—”
“Can’t go out with no one till Friday—”
“Takes away our fake i.d.’s—”
“Won’t let us answer the phone—”
“We march upstairs and slam our bedroom door, like, just a little slam to let her know what we think of her—”
“And up she comes with a screwdriver and takes our door off its hinges!”
“Hmm,” Dominick said.
Macon rested his bag on the hood and peered down into the engine. “Car acting up again?” he asked.
The Butler twins said, “Hey there, Macon,” and Dominick straightened and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He was a dark, good-looking boy whose bulging muscles made Macon feel inadequate. “Damn thing keeps stalling out,” he said.
“How’d Muriel get to work?”
“Had to take the bus.”
Macon was hoping to hear she’d stayed home.
He climbed the steps and unlocked the front door. Just inside, Edward greeted him, squeaking and doing back flips and trying to hold still long enough to be petted. Macon walked through the rest of the house. Clearly, everyone had left in a hurry. The sofa was opened out. (Claire must have had another fight with her folks.) The kitchen table was littered with dishes and no one had put the cream away. Macon did that. Then he took his bag upstairs. Muriel’s bed was unmade and her robe was slung across a chair. There was a snarl of hair in the pin tray on her bureau. He picked it up between thumb and index finger and dropped it into the wastebasket. It occurred to him (not for the first time) that the world was divided sharply down the middle: Some lived careful lives and some lived careless lives, and everything that happened could be explained by the difference between them. But he could not have said, not in a million years, why he was so moved by the sight of Muriel’s thin quilt trailing across the floor where she must have dragged it when she rose in the morning.
It wasn’t quite time for Alexander to come home from school, so he thought he would walk the dog. He put Edward on his leash and let himself out the front door. When he passed the Butler twins again they said, “Hey, there, Macon,” singsong as ever, while Dominick cursed and reached for a wrench.
The men standing on the corner were discussing a rumor of jobs in Texas. Someone’s brother-in-law had found work there. Macon passed with his head lowered, feeling uncomfortably privileged. He skirted a welcome mat that had been scrubbed and set out to dry on the pavement. The women here took spring cleaning seriously, he saw. They shook their dust mops out of upstairs windows; they sat on their sills to polish the panes with crumpled sheets of newspapers. They staggered between houses with borrowed vacuum cleaners, rug machines, and gallon jugs of upholstery shampoo. Macon rounded the block