The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [19]
Well, everything was silly, when you got right down to it.
The neighborhood must have learned by now that Sarah had left him. People started telephoning on ordinary weeknights and inviting him to take “potluck” with them. Macon thought at first they meant one of those arrangements where everybody brings a different pot of something and if you’re lucky you end up with a balanced meal. He arrived at Bob and Sue Carney’s with a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Since Sue was serving spaghetti, he didn’t feel he’d been all that lucky. She set his macaroni at one end of the table and no one ate it but Delilah, the three-year-old. She had several helpings, though.
Macon hadn’t expected to find the children at the table. He saw he was somebody different now, some kind of bachelor uncle who was assumed to need a glimpse of family life from time to time. But the fact was, he had never much liked other people’s children. And gatherings of any sort depressed him. Physical contact with people not related to him—an arm around his shoulder, a hand on his sleeve—made him draw inward like a snail. “You know, Macon,” Sue Carney said, leaning across the table to pat his wrist, “whenever you get the urge, you’re welcome to drop in on us. Don’t wait for an invitation.”
“That’s nice of you, Sue,” he said. He wondered why it was that outsiders’ skin felt so unreal—almost waxy, as if there were an invisible extra layer between him and them. As soon as possible, he moved his wrist.
“If you could live any way you wanted,” Sarah had once told him, “I suppose you’d end up on a desert island with no other human beings.”
“Why! That’s not true at all,” he’d said. “I’d have you, and Ethan, and my sister and brothers . . .”
“But no people. I mean, people there just by chance, people you didn’t know.”
“Well, no, I guess not,” he’d said. “Would you?”
But of course she would—back then. Back before Ethan died. She’d always been a social person. When there was nothing else to do she’d stroll happily through a shopping mall—Macon’s notion of hell, with all those strangers’ shoulders brushing his. Sarah thought crowds were exciting. She liked to meet new people. She was fond of parties, even cocktail parties. You’d have to be crazy to like cocktail parties, Macon thought—those scenes of confusion she used to drag him to, where he was made to feel guilty if he managed by some fluke to get involved in a conversation of any depth. “Circulate. Circulate,” Sarah would hiss, passing behind him with her drink.
That had changed during this past year. Sarah didn’t like crowds anymore. She never went near a mall, hadn’t made him go to any parties. They attended only quiet little dinners and she herself had not given a dinner since Ethan died. He’d asked her once, “Shouldn’t we have the Smiths and Millards over? They’ve had us so often.”
Sarah said, “Yes. You’re right. Pretty soon.” And then did nothing about it.
He and she had met at a party. They’d been seventeen years old. It was one of those mixer things, combining their two schools. Even at that age Macon had disliked parties, but he was secretly longing to fall in love and so he had braved this mixer but then stood off in a corner looking unconcerned, he hoped, and sipping his ginger ale. It was 1958. The rest of the world was in button-down shirts, but Macon wore a black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and sandals. (He was passing through his poet stage.) And Sarah, a bubbly girl with a tumble of copper-brown curls and a round face, large blue eyes, a plump lower lip—she wore something pink, he remembered, that made her skin look radiant. She was ringed by admiring boys. She was short and tidily made, and there was something plucky about the way her little tan calves were so firmly braced,