The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [57]
“What have I given up on?”
She refolded the napkin and blotted her eyes. An appealing blur of mascara shadowed the skin beneath them. She said, “Remember Betty Grand?”
“No.”
“Betty Grand, she went to my school. You used to like her before you met me.”
“I never liked anyone on earth before I met you,” Macon said.
“You liked Betty Grand, Macon. You told me so when we first went out. You asked me if I knew her. You said you used to think she was pretty and you’d invited her to a ball game but she turned you down. You told me you’d changed your mind about her being pretty. Her gums showed any time she smiled, you said.”
Macon still didn’t remember, but he said, “Well? So?”
“Everything that might touch you or upset you or disrupt you, you’ve given up without a murmur and done without, said you never wanted it anyhow.”
“I suppose I would have done better if I’d gone on pining for Betty Grand all my life.”
“Well, you would have shown some feeling, at least.”
“I do show feeling, Sarah. I’m sitting here with you, am I not? You don’t see me giving up on you.”
She chose not to hear this. “And when Ethan died,” she said, “you peeled every single Wacky Pack sticker off his bedroom door. You emptied his closet and his bureau as if you couldn’t be rid of him soon enough. You kept offering people his junk in the basement, stilts and sleds and skateboards, and you couldn’t understand why they didn’t accept them. ‘I hate to see stuff there useless,’ you said. Macon, I know you loved him but I can’t help thinking you didn’t love him as much as I did, you’re not so torn apart by his going. I know you mourned him but there’s something so what-do-you-call, so muffled about the way you experience things, I mean love or grief or anything; it’s like you’re trying to slip through life unchanged. Don’t you see why I had to get out?”
“Sarah, I’m not muffled. I . . . endure. I’m trying to endure. I’m standing fast, I’m holding steady.”
“If you really think that,” Sarah said, “then you’re fooling yourself. You’re not holding steady; you’re ossified. You’re encased. You’re like something in a capsule. You’re a dried-up kernel of a man that nothing real penetrates. Oh, Macon, it’s not by chance you write those silly books telling people how to take trips without a jolt. That traveling armchair isn’t just your logo; it’s you.”
“No, it’s not,” Macon said. “It’s not!”
Sarah pulled her coat on, making a sloppy job of it. One corner of her collar was tucked inside. “So anyway,” she said. “This is what I wanted to tell you: I’m having John Albright send you a letter.”
“Who’s John Albright?”
“He’s an attorney.”
“Oh,” Macon said.
It was at least a full minute before he thought to say, “I guess you must mean a lawyer.”
Sarah collected her purse, stood up, and walked out.
Macon made his way conscientiously through his shrimp salad. He ate his cole slaw for the vitamin C. Then he finished every last one of his potato chips, although he knew his tongue would feel shriveled the following morning.
Once when Ethan was little, not more than two or three, he had run out into the street after a ball. Macon had been too far away to stop him. All he could do was shout, “No!” and then watch, frozen with horror, as a pickup truck came barreling around the curve. In that instant, he released his claim. In one split second he adjusted to a future that held no Ethan—an immeasurably bleaker place but also, by way of compensation, plainer and simpler, free of the problems a small child trails along with him, the endless demands and the mess and the contests for his mother’s attention. Then the truck stopped short and Ethan retrieved his ball, and Macon’s knees went weak with relief. But he remembered forever after how quickly he had adjusted. He wondered, sometimes, if that first adjustment had somehow stuck, making what happened to Ethan later less of a shock than it might have been. But if people didn’t adjust, how could they bear to go on?
He called for his