The Accidental Tourist (20 page)

Rose glanced over. “That’s the family from Liberty’s dollhouse,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Her mother sent me those pictures.”

“It’s a family with nothing but grown-ups?” he asked.

“One’s a boy; you just can’t tell. And one’s a grandpa or a butler; June says Liberty switches him back and forth.”

Macon laid the photos aside without looking at the rest of them. He knelt to pat Edward. “A cattle straddle,” Charles was saying thoughtfully. Macon suddenly wished he were at Muriel’s. He wrapped his arms around Edward and imagined he smelled her sharp perfume deep in Edward’s fur.

Oh, above all else he was an orderly man. He was happiest with a regular scheme of things. He tended to eat the same meals over and over and to wear the same clothes; to drop off his cleaning on a certain set day and to pay all his bills on another. The teller who helped him on his first trip to a bank was the teller he went to forever after, even if she proved not to be efficient, even if the next teller’s line was shorter. There was no room in his life for anyone as unpredictable as Muriel. Or as extreme. Or as . . . well, unlikable, sometimes.

Her youthfulness was not appealing but unsettling. She barely remembered Vietnam and had no idea where she’d been when Kennedy was shot. She made him anxious about his own age, which had not previously troubled him. He realized how stiffly he walked after he had been sitting in one position too long; how he favored his back, always expecting it to go out on him again; how once was plenty whenever they made love.

And she talked so much—almost ceaselessly; while Macon was the kind of man to whom silence was better than music. (“Listen! They’re playing my song,” he used to say when Sarah switched the radio off.) She talked about blushers, straighteners, cellulite, hemlines, winter skin. She was interested in the appearance of things, only the appearance: in lipstick shades and nail wrapping and facial masques and split ends. Once, on one of her more attractive days, he told her she was looking very nice, and she grew so flustered that she stumbled over a curb. She asked if that was because she had tied her hair back; and was it the hair itself or the ribbon; or rather the color of the ribbon, which she’d feared might be just a little too bright and set off the tone of her complexion wrong. And didn’t he think her hair was hopeless, kerblamming out the way it did in the slightest bit of humidity? Till he was sorry he had ever brought it up. Well, not sorry, exactly, but tired. Exhausted.

Yet she could raise her chin sometimes and pierce his mind like a blade. Certain images of her at certain random, insignificant moments would flash before him: Muriel at her kitchen table, ankles twined around her chair rungs, filling out a contest form for an all-expense-paid tour of Hollywood. Muriel telling her mirror, “I look like the wrath of God”—a kind of ritual of leavetaking. Muriel doing the dishes in her big pink rubber gloves with the crimson fingernails, raising a soapy plate and trailing it airily over to the rinse water and belting out one of her favorite songs—“War is Hell on the Home Front Too” or “I Wonder if God Likes Country Music.” (Certainly
she
liked country music—long, complaining ballads about the rocky road of life, the cold gray walls of prison, the sleazy, greasy heart of a two-faced man.) And Muriel at the hospital window, as he’d never actually seen her, holding a mop and gazing down at the injured coming in.

Then he knew that what mattered was the pattern of her life; that although he did not love her he loved the surprise of her, and also the surprise of himself when he was with her. In the foreign country that was Singleton Street he was an entirely different person. This person had never been suspected of narrowness, never been accused of chilliness; in fact, was mocked for his soft heart. And was anything but orderly.

“Why don’t you come to my folks’ house for Christmas dinner?” she asked him.

Macon was in her kitchen at the time. He was crouched beneath the sink, turning off a valve. For a moment he didn’t answer; then he emerged and said, “Your folks?”

“For Christmas dinner.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know,” he said.

“Come on, Macon, please say yes! I want you to meet them. Ma thinks I’m making you up. ‘You made him up,’ she says. You know how she is.”

Yes, Macon did know, at least from second hand, and he could just imagine what that dinner would be like. Booby-trapped. Full of hidden digs and hurt feelings. The fact was, he just didn’t want to get involved.

So instead of answering, he turned his attention to Alexander. He was trying to teach Alexander how to fix a faucet. “Now,” he said, “you see I shut the valve off. What did I do that for?”

All he got was a glassy pale stare. This was Macon’s idea, not Alexander’s. Alexander had been hauled away from the TV like a sack of stones, plunked on a kitchen chair, and instructed to watch closely. “Oh,” Muriel said, “I’m not sure about this. He’s not so very strong.”

“You don’t have to be Tarzan to fix a kitchen faucet, Muriel.”

“Well, no, but I don’t know . . .”

Sometimes Macon wondered if Alexander’s ailments were all in Muriel’s head.

“Why did I shut off the valve, Alexander?” he asked.

Alexander said, “Why.”

“You tell me.”

“You tell
me
.”

“No, you,” Macon said firmly.

There was a bad moment or two in which it seemed that Alexander might keep up that stare of his forever. He sat C-shaped in his chair, chin on one hand, eyes expressionless. The shins emerging from his trousers were thin as Tinkertoys, and his brown school shoes seemed very large and heavy. Finally he said, “So the water won’t whoosh all over.”

“Right.”

Macon was careful not to make too much of his victory.

“Now, this leak is not from the spout, but from the handle,” he said. “So you want to take the handle apart and replace the packing. First you unscrew the top screw. Let’s see you do it.”

“Me?”

Macon nodded and offered him the screwdriver.

“I don’t want to,” Alexander said.

“Let him just watch,” Muriel suggested.

“If he just watched he won’t know how to fix the one in the bathtub, and I’m going to ask him to manage that without me.”

Alexander took the screwdriver, in one of those small, stingy gestures of his that occupied a minimum of space. He inched off the chair and came over to the sink. Macon pulled another chair up close and Alexander climbed onto it. Then there was the problem of fitting the screwdriver into the slot of the screw. It took him forever. He had tiny fingers, each tipped with a little pink pad above painfully bitten nails. He concentrated, his glasses slipping down on his nose. Always a mouth-breather, he was biting his tongue now and panting slightly.

“Wonderful,” Macon said when the screwdriver finally connected.

At each infinitesimal turn, though, it slipped and had to be repositioned. Macon’s stomach muscles felt tight. Muriel, for once, was silent, and her silence was strained and anxious.

Then, “Ah!” Macon said. The screw had loosened enough so that Alexander could twist it by hand. He managed that part fairly easily. He even removed the faucet without being told. “Very good,” Macon said. “I believe you may have natural talents.”

Muriel relaxed. Leaning back against the counter, she said, “My folks have their Christmas dinner in the daytime. I mean it’s not at noon but it’s not at night either, it’s more like midafternoon, or this year it’s really late afternoon because I’ve got the morning shift at the Meow-Bow and—”

“Look at this,” Macon told Alexander. “See that gunk? That’s old, rotted packing. So take it away. Right. Now here’s the new packing. You wind it around, wind even a little more than you need. Let’s see you wind it around.”

Alexander wrapped the thread. His fingers turned white with the effort. Muriel said, “Usually we have a goose. My daddy brings a goose from the Eastern Shore. Or don’t you care for goose. Would you rather just a turkey? A duck? What are you used to eating, Macon?”

Macon said, “Oh, well . . .” and was saved by Alexander. Alexander turned, having reassembled the faucet without any help, and said, “Now what?”

“Now make sure the screw is well in.”

Alexander resumed his struggles with the screwdriver. Muriel said, “Maybe you’d rather a good hunk of beef. I know some men are like that. They think poultry is kind of pansy. Is that how you think too? You can tell me! I won’t mind! My folks won’t mind!”

“Oh, um, Muriel . . .”

“Now what,” Alexander ordered.

“Why, now we turn the water back on and see what kind of job you’ve done.”

Macon crouched beneath the sink and showed him where the valve was. Alexander reached past him and twisted it, grunting. Wasn’t it odd, Macon thought, how little boys all had that same slightly green smell, like a cedar closet. He rose and turned on the faucet. No leak. “Look at that!” he told Alexander. “You’ve solved the problem.”

Alexander fought to hold a grin back.

“Will you know how to do it the next time?”

He nodded.

“Now when you’re grown,” Macon said, “you can fix the faucets for your wife.”

Alexander’s face squinched up with amusement at the thought.

“ ‘Step back, dearie,’ you can say. ‘Just let me see to this.’ ”

Alexander said, “Tssh!”—his face like a little drawstring purse.

“ ‘Let a real
man
take care of this,’ you can tell her.”

“Tssh! Tssh!”

“Macon? Are you coming to my folks’, or aren’t you?” Muriel asked.

It seemed unreasonable to say he wasn’t. Somehow or other, he had got himself involved already.

thirteen

Muriel’s parents lived out in Timonium, in a development called Foxhunt Acres. Muriel had to show Macon the way. It was the coldest Christmas Day either of them could remember, but they drove with the windows slightly open so that Alexander, riding in back, would not be bothered by the dog hair. The radio was tuned to Muriel’s favorite station. Connie Francis was singing “Baby’s First Christmas.”

“You warm enough?” Muriel asked Alexander. “You doing okay?”

Alexander must have nodded.

“You feel like you’re wheezing at all?”

“Nope.”

“No, ma’am,” she corrected him.

Sarah used to do that, too, Macon remembered—give their son a crash course in manners anytime they set out to visit her mother.

Muriel said, “Once I was riding Alexander uptown on some errands for George? My company? And I had these two cats in the car just the day before? And I didn’t think a thing about it, clean forgot to vacuum like I usually do, and all at once I turn around and Alexander’s stretched across the seat, flat out.”

“I wasn’t flat
out
,” Alexander said.

“You were just as good as.”

“I was only laying down so I wouldn’t need so much air.”

“See there?” Muriel said to Macon.

They were traveling up York Road now, past body shops and fast food outlets all closed and bleak. Macon had never seen this road so empty. He overtook a van and then a taxicab; nothing else. Swags of Christmas greens hung stiffly above a used car lot.

“He can get shots, though,” Muriel said.

“Shots?”

“He can get shots to keep him from wheezing.”

“Then why doesn’t he?”

“Well, if Edward was to move in I guess that’s what we’d do.”

“Edward?”

“I mean if, you know. If you moved in on a permanent basis and Edward came too.”

“Oh,” Macon said.

Brenda Lee was singing “I’m Gonna Lasso Santa Claus.” Muriel hummed along, tipping her head perkily left and right to keep time.

“Would you ever think of doing that?” she asked him finally.

“Doing what?” he said, pretending not to know.

“Would you ever think of moving in with us?”

“Oh, um . . .”

“Or we could move in with you,” she said. “Either way you preferred.”

“With me? But my sister and my—”

“I’m talking about
your
house.”

“Oh. My house.”

His house swam up before him—small and dim and abandoned, hunkered beneath the oak trees like a woodchopper’s cottage in a fairy tale. Muriel glanced at his face and then said, quickly, “I could understand if you didn’t want to go back there.”

“It’s not that,” he said. He cleared his throat. He said, “It’s just that I haven’t given it much thought.”

“Oh, I understand!”

“Not yet, at least.”

“You don’t have to explain!”

She pointed out where to turn, and they started down a winding road. The eating places grew sparser and shabbier. There were scratchy little trees, frozen fields, a whole village of different-sized mailboxes bristling at the end of a driveway.

Every time the car jounced, something rattled on the backseat. That was Macon’s Christmas present to Alexander—a kit full of tools that were undersized but real, with solid wooden handles. Macon had hunted those tools down one by one. He had rearranged them in their compartments a dozen times at least, like a miser counting his money.

They passed a segment of rickrack fence that was dissolving back into the ground. Muriel said, “What is
your
family doing today?”

“Oh, nothing much.”

“Having a big Christmas dinner?”

“No, Rose has gone to Julian’s. Charles and Porter are, I don’t know, I think they said something about caulking the second-floor bathtub.”

“Oh, the poor things! They should have come with us to my folks’.”

Macon smiled, picturing that.

He turned where she directed, into a meadow dotted with houses. All were built to the same general plan—brick with half-stories of aluminum siding above. The streets were named for trees that weren’t there, Birch Lane and Elm Court and Apple Blossom Way. Muriel had him make a right onto Apple Blossom Way. He pulled up behind a station wagon. A girl burst out of the house—a chunky, pretty teenager in blue jeans and a long yellow ponytail. “Claire!” Alexander shouted, bouncing in his seat.

“That’s my sister,” Muriel told Macon.

“Ah.”

“Do you think she’s good-looking?”

“Yes, she’s very good-looking.”

Claire had the car door open by now and was hoisting Alexander into her arms. “How’s my fellow?” she was asking. “What did Santa Claus bring you?” She was so unlike Muriel that you’d never guess they were sisters. Her face was almost square, and her skin was golden, and by present-day standards she was probably ten pounds overweight. After she’d set Alexander down, she stuffed her hands awkwardly into the back pockets of her jeans. “So anyhow,” she told Macon and Muriel. “Merry Christmas, and all that.”

“Look,” Muriel said, flashing a wristwatch. “See what Macon gave me.”

“What’d you give him?”

“A key tag from a thrift shop. Antique.”

“Oh.”

With her house key attached, Muriel had neglected to say.

Macon unloaded things from the trunk—Muriel’s presents for her family, along with his hostess gift—and Alexander took his toolbox from the backseat. They followed Claire across the yard. Muriel was anxiously feeling her hair as she walked. “You ought to see what Daddy gave Ma,” Claire told her. “Gave her a microwave oven. Ma says she’s scared to death of it. ‘I just know I’ll get radiation,’ she says. We’re worried she won’t use it.”

The door was held open for them by a small, skinny, gray woman in an aqua pantsuit. “Ma, this is Macon,” Muriel said. “Macon, this is my mother.”

Mrs. Dugan studied him, pursing her lips. Lines radiated from the corners of her mouth like cat whiskers. “Pleased to meet you,” she said finally.

“Merry Christmas, Mrs. Dugan,” Macon said. He handed her his gift—a bottle of cranberry liqueur with a ribbon tied around it. She studied that, too.

“Just put the rest of those things under the tree,” Muriel told Macon. “Ma, aren’t you going to say hello to your grandson?”

Mrs. Dugan glanced briefly at Alexander. He must not have expected anything more; he was already wandering over to the Christmas tree. Unrelated objects sat beneath it—a smoke detector, an electric drill, a makeup mirror encircled with light bulbs. Macon laid Muriel’s packages next to them, and then he removed his coat and draped it across the arm of a white satin couch. Fully a third of the couch was occupied by the microwave oven, still jauntily decorated with a large red bow. “Look at my new microwave,” Mrs. Dugan said. “If that’s not just the weirdest durn thing I ever laid eyes on.” She cleared a crumple of gift wrap off an armchair and waved Macon into it.

“Something certainly smells good,” he said.

“Goose,” she told him. “Boyd went and shot me a goose.”

She sat down next to the oven. Claire was on the floor with Alexander, helping him open a package. Muriel, still in her coat, scanned a row of books on a shelf. “Ma—” she said. “No, never mind, I found it.” She came over to Macon with a photo album, the modern kind with clear plastic pages. “Look here,” she said, perching on the arm of his chair. “Pictures of me when I was little.”

“Why not take off your coat and stay a while,” Mrs. Dugan told her.

“Me at six months. Me in my stroller. Me and my first birthday cake.”

They were color photos, shiny, the reds a little too blue. (Macon’s own baby pictures were black-and-white, which was all that was generally available back then.) Each showed her to be a chubby, giggling blonde, usually with her hair fixed in some coquettish style— tied in a sprig at the top of her head, or in double ponytails so highly placed they looked like puppy ears. At first the stages of her life passed slowly—it took her three full pages to learn to walk—but then they speeded up. “Me at two. Me at five. Me when I was seven and a half.” The chubby blonde turned thin and dark and sober and then vanished altogether, replaced by the infant Claire. Muriel said, “Oh, well,” and snapped the album shut just midway through. “Wait,” Macon told her. He had an urge to see her at her worst, at her most outlandish, hanging out with motorcycle gangs. But when he took the album away from her and flipped to the very last pages, they were blank.

Mr. Dugan wandered in—a fair, freckled man in a plaid flannel shirt—and gave Macon a callused hand to shake and then wandered out again, mumbling something about the basement. “He’s fretting over the pipes,” Mrs. Dugan explained. “Last night it got down below zero, did you know that? He’s worried the pipes’ll freeze.”

“Oh, could I help?” Macon asked, perking up.

“Now, you just sit right where you are, Mr. Leary.”

“Macon,” he said.

“Macon. And you can call me Mother Dugan.”

“Um . . .”

“Muriel tells me you’re separated, Macon.”

“Well, yes, I am.”

“Do you think it’s going to take?”

“Pardon?”

“I mean you’re not just leading this child around Robin Hood’s barn now, are you?”

“Ma, quit that,” Muriel said.

“Well, I wouldn’t have to ask, Muriel, if you had ever showed the least bit of common sense on your own. I mean face it, you don’t have such a great track record.”

“She’s just worried for me,” Muriel told Macon.

“Well, of course,” he said.

“This girl was not but thirteen years old,” Mrs. Dugan said, “when all at once it seemed boys of the very slipperiest character just came crawling out of the woodwork. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since.”

“Well, I don’t know why not,” Muriel told her. “That was years and years ago.”

“Seemed every time we turned around, off she’d gone to the Surf’n’Turf or the Torch Club or the Hi-Times Lounge on Highway Forty.”

“Ma, will you please open up you and Daddy’s Christmas present?”

“Oh, did you bring us a present?”

Muriel rose to fetch it from under the tree, where Claire sat with Alexander. She was helping him set up some little cardboard figures. “This one goes on the green. This one goes on the blue,” she said. Alexander jittered next to her, impatient to take over.

“Claire was the one who picked that game for him,” Mrs. Dugan said, accepting the package Muriel handed her. “I thought it was too advanced, myself.”

“It is not,” Muriel said (although she hadn’t even glanced at it). She returned to Macon’s chair. “Alexander’s just as smart as a tack. He’ll catch on in no time.”

“Nobody said he wasn’t smart, Muriel. You don’t have to take offense at every little thing a person says.”

“Will you just open your present?”

But Mrs. Dugan proceeded at her own pace. She took off the ribbon and laid it in a box on the coffee table. “Your daddy has a bit of cash for your Christmas,” she told Muriel. “Remind him before you go.” She examined the wrapping. “Will you look at that! Teeny little Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeers all over it. Real aluminum foil for their noses. I don’t know why you couldn’t just use tissue like I do.”

“I wanted it to be special,” Muriel told her.

Mrs. Dugan took off the paper, folded it, and laid it aside. Her gift was something in a gilded frame. “Well, isn’t that nice,” she said finally. She turned it toward Macon. It was a picture of Muriel and Alexander—a studio portrait in dreamy pastels, the lighting so even that it seemed to be coming from no particular place at all. Muriel was seated and Alexander stood beside her, one hand resting delicately upon her shoulder. Neither of them smiled. They looked wary and uncertain, and very much alone.

Macon said, “It’s beautiful.”

Mrs. Dugan only grunted and leaned forward to lay the photo beside the box of ribbons.

Dinner was an industrious affair, with everyone working away at the food—goose, cranberry relish, two kinds of potatoes, and three kinds of vegetables. Mr. Dugan remained spookily quiet, although Macon offered him several openers about the basement plumbing. Muriel devoted herself to Alexander. “There’s bread in that stuffing, Alexander. Put it back this instant. You want your allergy to start up? I wouldn’t trust that relish, either.”

“Oh, for Lord’s sake, let him be,” Mrs. Dugan said.

“You wouldn’t say that if it was you he kept awake at night with itchy rashes.”

“Half the time I believe you bring on those rashes yourself with all your talk,” Mrs. Dugan said.

“That just shows how much you know about it.”

Macon had a sudden feeling of dislocation. What would Sarah say if she could see him here? He imagined her amused, ironic expression. Rose and his brothers would just look baffled. Julian would say, “Ha!
Accidental Tourist in Timonium.
”

Mrs. Dugan brought out three different pies, and Claire scurried around with the coffeepot. Over her jeans now she wore an embroidered dirndl skirt—her gift from Muriel, purchased last week at Value Village. Her layers of clothing reminded Macon of some native costume. “What about the liqueur?” she asked her mother. “Shall I set out Macon’s liqueur?”

“Maybe he wants you to call him Mr. Leary, hon.”

“No, please, Macon’s fine,” he said.

He supposed there’d been a lot of discussion about his age. Oh, no doubt about it: He was too old, he was too tall, he was too dressed up in his suit and tie.

Mrs. Dugan said the liqueur was just about the best thing she’d ever drunk. Macon himself found it similar to the fluoride mixture his dentist coated his teeth with; he’d envisioned something different. Mr. Dugan said, “Well, these sweet-tasting, pretty-colored drinks are all very well for the ladies, but personally I favor a little sipping whiskey, don’t you, Macon?” and he rose and brought back a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and two shot glasses. The mere weight of the bottle in his hand seemed to loosen his tongue. “So!” he said, sitting down. “What you driving these days, Macon?”

“Driving? Oh, um, a Toyota.”

Mr. Dugan frowned. Claire giggled. “Daddy hates and despises foreign cars,” she told Macon.