Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Anne Tyler
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Read on for an extract from Vinegar Girl
Copyright
When Dorothy came back from the dead, Aaron noticed that some people simply ignored the fact; some seemed to have forgotten she had died in the first place; and others just walked straight on by.
The accident that killed Dorothy — involving an oak tree, a sun porch and some elusive biscuits — leaves Aaron bereft and the house a wreck. As those around him fuss and flap and bring him casserole after casserole, Aaron ploughs on. He busies himself with work at the family firm, a publisher with a successful line in ‘Beginner’s Guides’ to every stage and aspect of life. But then Dorothy starts to materialize in the oddest places. At first, she only comes for a short while, leaving Aaron longing for more. Gradually she stays for longer, and as they talk they also bicker …
The cracks that start to reappear in their perfectly normal marriage are as well worn and familiar to Aaron as Dorothy herself. As Aaron starts to emerge from his grief, they are also a reassuringly poignant reminder that life may move on, but some things will forever remain the same.
Born in Minneapolis in 1941, Anne Tyler lives in Baltimore where her novels are set. She is the Pulitzer-prize winning author of Breathing Lessons and other bestselling novels, including The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America and Noah’s Compass. She has recently received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, which recognises a lifetime’s achievement in books.
Also by Anne Tyler
If Morning Ever Comes
The Tin Can Tree
A Slipping-Down Life
The Clock Winder
Celestial Navigation
Searching for Caleb
Earthly Possessions
Morgan’s Passing
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The Accidental Tourist
Breathing Lessons
Saint Maybe
Ladder of Years
A Patchwork Planet
Back When We Were Grownups
The Amateur Marriage
Digging to America
Noah’s Compass
KATE BATTISTA WAS gardening out back when she heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. She straightened up and listened. Her sister was in the house, although she might not be awake yet. But then there was another ring, and two more after that, and when she finally heard her sister’s voice it was only the announcement on the answering machine. “Hi-yee! It’s us? We’re not home, looks like? So leave a—”
By that time Kate was striding toward the back steps, tossing her hair off her shoulders with an exasperated “Tcch!” She wiped her hands on her jeans and yanked the screen door open. “Kate,” her father was saying, “pick up.”
She lifted the receiver. “What,” she said.
“I forgot my lunch.”
Her eyes went to the counter beside the fridge where, sure enough, his lunch sat precisely where she had set it the night before. She always used those clear plastic bags that supermarket produce came in, and the contents were plainly visible: a Tupperware sandwich box and an apple. “Huh,” she said.
“Can you bring it?”
“Bring it now?”
“Right.”
“Jesus, Father. I’m not the Pony Express,” she said.
“What else have you got to do?” he asked her.
“It’s Sunday! I’m weeding the hellebores.”
“Ah, Kate, don’t be like that. Just hop in the car and zip over; there’s a good girl.”
“Sheesh,” she said, and she slammed the receiver down and took the lunch bag from the counter.
There were several strange things about this conversation. The first was that it had happened at all; her father distrusted the telephone. In fact his lab didn’t even have a telephone, so he must have called on his cell phone. And that was unusual too, because his only reason for owning a cell phone was that his daughters had insisted. He had gone into a brief flurry of app purchases when he first acquired it—scientific calculators of various types, for the most part—and after that had lost all interest, and avoided it now altogether.
Then there was the fact that he forgot his lunch about twice a week, but had never before seemed to notice. The man did not eat, basically. Kate would get home from work and find his lunch still sitting on the counter, and yet even so she would have to shout for him three or four times that evening before he would come to dinner. Always he had something better to do, some journal to read or notes to go over. He would probably starve to death if he were living alone.
And supposing he did feel a bit peckish, he could have just stepped out and bought something. His lab was near the Johns Hopkins campus, and there were sandwich shops and convenience stores everywhere you looked.
Not to mention that it wasn’t even noon yet.
But the day was sunny and breezy, if cool—the first semi-decent weather after a long, hard, bitter winter—and she didn’t actually mind an excuse to get out in the world. She wouldn’t take the car, though; she would walk. Let him wait. (He himself never took the car, unless he had some sort of equipment to ferry. He was something of a health fiend.)
She stepped out the front door, shutting it extra hard behind her because it irked her that Bunny was sleeping so late. The ground cover along the front walk had a twiggy, littered look, and she made a mental note to spruce it up after she finished with the hellebores.
Swinging the lunch bag by its twist-tied neck, she passed the Mintzes’ house and the Gordons’ house—stately brick center-hall Colonials like the Battistas’ own, although better maintained—and turned the corner. Mrs. Gordon was kneeling among her azalea bushes, spreading mulch around their roots. “Why, hello there, Kate!” she sang out.
“Hi.”
“Looks like spring might be thinking of coming!”
“Yup.”
Kate strode on without slowing, her buckskin jacket flying out behind her. A pair of young women—most likely Hopkins students—drifted at a snail’s pace ahead of her. “I could tell he wanted to ask me,” one was saying, “because he kept clearing his throat in that way they do, you know? But then not speaking.”
“I love when they’re so shy,” the other one said.
Kate veered around them and kept going.
At the next street she took a left, heading toward a more mixed-and-mingled neighborhood of apartments and small cafés and houses partitioned into offices, and eventually she turned in at yet another brick Colonial. This one had a smaller front yard than the Battistas’ but a larger, grander portico. Six or eight plaques beside the front door spelled out the names of various offbeat organizations and obscure little magazines. There was no plaque for Louis Battista, though. He had been shunted around to so many different buildings over the years, landing finally in this orphan location near the university but miles from the medical complex, that he’d probably decided it just wasn’t worth the effort.
In the foyer an array of mailboxes lined one wall, and sliding heaps of flyers and takeout menus covered the rickety bench beneath them. Kate walked past several offices, but only the Christians for Buddha door stood open. Inside she glimpsed a trio of women grouped around a desk where a fourth woman sat dabbing her eyes with a tissue. (Always something going on.) Kate opened another door at the far end of the hall and descended a flight of steep wooden stairs. At the bottom she paused to punch in the code: 1957, the date Witebsky first defined the criteria for autoimmune disorders.
The room she entered was tiny, furnished only by a card table and two metal folding chairs. A brown paper bag sat on the table; another lunch, it looked like. She set her father’s lunch next to it and then went over to a door and gave a couple of brisk knocks. After a moment, her father poked his head out—his satiny bald scalp bordered by a narrow band of black hair, his olive-skinned face punctuated by a black mustache and round-lensed, rimless spectacles. “Ah, Kate,” he said. “Come in.”
“No, thanks,” she said. She never could abide the smells of the place—the thin, stinging smell of the lab itself and the dry-paper smell of the mouse room. “Your lunch is on the table,” she said. “Bye.”
“No, wait!”
He turned from her to speak to someone in the room behind him. “Pyoder? Come out and say hello to my daughter.”
“I’ve got to go,” Kate said.
“I don’t think you’ve ever met my research assistant,” her father said.
“That’s okay.”
But the door opened wider, and a solid, muscular man with straight yellow hair stepped up to stand next to her father. His white lab coat was so dingy that it very nearly matched Dr. Battista’s pale-gray coveralls. “Vwouwv!” he said. Or that was what it sounded like, at least. He was gazing at Kate admiringly. Men often wore that look when they first saw her. It was due to a bunch of dead cells: her hair, which was blue-black and billowy and extended below her waist.
“This is Pyoder Cherbakov,” her father told her.
“Pyotr,” the man corrected him, allowing no space at all between the sharp-pointed t and the ruffly, rolling r. And “Shcherbakov,” explosively spitting out the mishmash of consonants.
“Pyoder, meet Kate.”
“Hi,” Kate said. “See you later,” she told her father.
“I thought you might stay a moment.”
“What for?”
“Well, you’ll need to take back my sandwich box, will you not?”
“Well, you can bring it back yourself, can you not?”
A sudden hooting sound made both of them glance in Pyotr’s direction. “Just like the girls in my country,” he said, beaming. “So rude-spoken.”
“Just like the women,” Kate said reprovingly.
“Yes, they also. The grandmothers and the aunties.”
She gave up on him. “Father,” she said, “will you tell Bunny she has to stop leaving such a mess when she has her friends in? Did you see the TV room this morning?”
“Yes, yes,” her father said, but he was heading back into the lab as he spoke. He returned, pushing a high stool on wheels. He parked it next to the table. “Have a seat,” he told her.
“I need to get back to my gardening.”
“Please, Kate,” he said. “You never keep me company.”
She stared at him. “Keep you company?”
“Sit, sit,” he said, motioning toward the stool. “You can have part of my sandwich.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said. But she perched awkwardly on the stool, still staring at him.
“Pyoder, sit. You can share my sandwich too, if you want. Kate made it especially. Peanut butter honey on whole-wheat.”
“You know I do not eat peanut butter,” Pyotr told him severely. He pulled out one of the folding chairs and settled catty-corner to Kate. His chair was considerably lower than her stool, and she could see how the hair was starting to thin across the top of his head. “In my country, peanuts are pigs’ food.”
“Ha, ha,” Dr. Battista said. “He’s very humorous, isn’t he, Kate?”
“What?”
“They eat them with the shells on,” Pyotr said.
He had trouble with th sounds, Kate noticed. And his vowels didn’t seem to last long enough. She had no patience with foreign accents.
“Were you surprised that I used my cell phone?” her father asked her. He was still standing, for some reason. He pulled his phone from a pocket in his coveralls. “You girls were right; it comes in handy,” he said. “I’m going to start using it more often now.” He frowned down at it a moment, as if he were trying to remember what it was. Then he punched a button and held it in front of his face. Squinting, he took several steps backward. There was a mechanical clicking sound. “See? It takes photographs,” he said.
“Erase it,” Kate ordered.
“I don’t know how,” he said, and the phone clicked again.
“Damn it, Father, sit down and eat. I need to get back to my gardening.”
“All right, all right.”
He tucked the phone away and sat down. Pyotr, meanwhile, was opening his lunch bag. He pulled out two eggs and then a banana and placed them on the flattened paper bag in front of him. “Pyoder believes in bananas,” Dr. Battista confided. “I keep telling him about apples, but does he listen?” He was opening his own lunch bag, taking out his apple. “Pectin! Pectin!” he told Pyotr, shaking the apple under Pyotr’s nose.
“Bananas are miracle food,” Pyotr said calmly, and he picked his up and started peeling it. He had a face that was almost hexagonal, Kate noticed—his cheekbones widening to two sharp points, the angles of his jaw two more points slanting to the point of his chin, and the long strands of his hair separating over his forehead to form the topmost point. “Also eggs,” he was saying. “The egg of the hen! So cleverly self-contained.”
“Kate makes my sandwich for me every single night before she goes to bed,” Dr. Battista said. “She’s very domestic.”
Kate blinked.
“Peanut butter, though,” Pyotr said.
“Well, yes.”
“Yes,” Pyotr said with a sigh. He sent her a look of regret. “But is certainly pretty enough.”
“You should see her sister.”
Kate said, “Oh! Father!”
“What?”
“This sister is where?” Pyotr asked.
“Well, Bunny is only fifteen. She’s still in high school.”
“Okay,” Pyotr said. He returned his gaze to Kate.
Kate wheeled her stool back sharply and stood up. “Don’t forget your Tupperware,” she told her father.
“What! You’re leaving? Why so soon?”
But Kate just said, “Bye”—mostly addressing Pyotr, who was watching her with a measuring look—and she marched to the door and flung it open.
“Katherine, dearest, don’t rush off!” Her father stood up. “Oh, dear, this isn’t going well at all. It’s just that she’s so busy, Pyoder. I can never get her to sit down and take a little break. Did I tell you she runs our whole house? She’s very domestic. Oh, I already said that. And she has a full-time job besides. Did I tell you she teaches preschool? She’s wonderful with small children.”
“Why are you talking this way?” Kate demanded, turning on him. “What’s come over you? I hate small children; you know that.”
There was another hooting sound from Pyotr. He was grinning up at her. “Why you hate small children?” he asked her.
“Well, they’re not very bright, if you’ve noticed.”
He hooted again. What with his hooting and the banana he held, he reminded her of a chimpanzee. She spun away and stalked out, letting the door slam shut, and climbed the stairs two at a time.
Behind her, she heard the door open again. Her father called, “Kate?” She heard his steps on the stairs, but she strode on toward the front of the building.
His steps softened as he arrived on the carpet. “I’ll just see you out, why don’t I?” he called after her.
See her out?
But she paused when she reached the front door. She turned to watch him approach.
“I’ve handled things badly,” he said. He smoothed his scalp with one palm. His coveralls were one-size-fits-all and they ballooned in the middle, giving him the look of a Teletubby. “I didn’t mean to make you angry,” he said.
“I’m not angry; I’m …”
But she couldn’t say the word “hurt.” It might bring tears to her eyes. “I’m fed up,” she said instead.
“I don’t understand.”
She could believe that, actually. Face it: he was clueless.
“And what were you trying to do back there?” she asked him, setting her fists on her hips. “Why were you acting so … peculiar with that assistant?”
“He’s not ‘that assistant;’ he’s Pyoder Cherbakov, whom I’m very lucky to have. Just look: he came in on a Sunday! He does that often. And he’s been with me nearly three years, by the way, so I would think you would at least be familiar with his name.”
“Three years? What happened to Ennis?”
“Good Lord! Ennis! Ennis was two assistants back.”
“Oh,” she said.
She didn’t know why he was acting so irritable. It wasn’t as if he ever talked about his assistants—or about anything, in fact.
“I seem to have a little trouble keeping them,” he said. “It may be that to outsiders, my project is not looking very promising.”
This wasn’t something he had admitted before, although from time to time Kate had wondered. It made her feel sorry for him, suddenly. She let her hands drop to her sides.
“I went to a great deal of effort to bring Pyoder to this country,” he said. “I don’t know if you realize. He was only twenty-five at the time, but everybody who’s anybody in autoimmunity had heard of him. He’s brilliant. He qualified for an O-1 visa, and that’s not something you often see these days.”
“Well, good, Father.”
“An extraordinary-ability visa; that’s what an O-1 is. It means that he possesses some extraordinary skill or knowledge that no one here in this country has, and that I am involved in some extraordinary research that justifies my needing him.”
“Good for you.”
“O-1 visas last three years.”
She reached out to touch his forearm. “Of course you’re anxious about your project,” she said, in what she hoped was an encouraging tone. “But I bet things will be fine.”
“You really think so?” he asked.
She nodded and gave his arm a couple of clumsy pats, which he must not have been expecting because he looked startled. “I’m sure of it,” she told him. “Don’t forget to bring your sandwich box home.”
Then she opened the front door and walked out into the sunshine. Two of the Christians for Buddha women were sitting on the steps with their heads together. They were laughing so hard about something that it took them a moment to notice her, but then they drew apart to let her pass.
THE STRANGEST THING about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.
We were strolling through Belvedere Square, for instance, on an early-spring afternoon when we met our old next-door neighbor, Jim Rust. “Well, what do you know,” he said to me. “Aaron!” Then he noticed Dorothy beside me. She stood peering up at him with one hand shielding her forehead from the sun. His eyes widened and he turned to me again.
I said, “How’s it going, Jim?”
Visibly, he pulled himself together. “Oh … great,” he said. “I mean … or, rather … but of course we miss you. Neighborhood is not the same without you!”
He was focusing on me alone—specifically, on my mouth, as if I were the one who was talking. He wouldn’t look at Dorothy. He had pivoted a few inches so as to exclude her from his line of vision.
I took pity on him. I said, “Well, tell everybody hello,” and we walked on. Beside me, Dorothy gave one of her dry chuckles.
Other people pretended not to recognize either one of us. They would catch sight of us from a distance, and this sort of jolt would alter their expressions and they would all at once dart down a side street, busy-busy, much to accomplish, very important concerns on their minds. I didn’t hold it against them. I knew this was a lot to adjust to. In their position, I might have behaved the same way. I like to think I wouldn’t, but I might have.
The ones who made me laugh aloud were the ones who had forgotten she’d died. Granted, there were only two or three of those—people who barely knew us. In line at the bank once we were spotted by Mr. von Sant, who had handled our mortgage application several years before. He was crossing the lobby and he paused to ask, “You two still enjoying the house?”
“Oh, yes,” I told him.
Just to keep things simple.
I pictured how the realization would hit him a few minutes later. Wait! he would say to himself, as he was sitting back down at his desk. Didn’t I hear something about …?
Unless he never gave us another thought. Or hadn’t heard the news in the first place. He’d go on forever assuming that the house was still intact, and Dorothy still alive, and the two of us still happily, unremarkably married.
I had moved in by then with my sister, who lived in our parents’ old place in north Baltimore. Was that why Dorothy came back when she did? She hadn’t much cared for Nandina. She thought she was too bossy. Well, she was too bossy. Is. She’s especially bossy with me, because I have a couple of handicaps. I may not have mentioned that. I have a crippled right arm and leg. Nothing that gets in my way, but you know how older sisters can be.
Oh, and also a kind of speech hesitation, but only intermittently. I seldom even hear it, myself.
In fact, I have often wondered what made Dorothy select the moment she did to come back. It wasn’t immediately after she died, which is when you might expect. It was months and months later. Almost a year. Of course I could have just asked her, but somehow, I don’t know, the question seemed impolite. I can’t explain exactly why.
One time we ran into Irene Lance, from my office. She’s the design person there. Dorothy and I were returning from lunch. Or I had had lunch, at least, and Dorothy had fallen into step beside me as I was walking back. And suddenly we noticed Irene approaching from St. Paul. Irene was hard to miss. She was always the most elegant woman on the street, not that that was much of a challenge in Baltimore. But she would have seemed elegant anywhere. She was tall and ice-blonde, wearing a long, flowing coat that day with the collar turned up around her throat and the hemline swirling about her shins in the brisk spring breeze. I was curious. How would a person like Irene handle this type of thing? So I slowed my pace, which caused Dorothy to slow hers, and by the time Irene caught sight of us we were almost at a standstill, both of us waiting to see what Irene would do.
Two or three feet away from us, she stopped short. “Oh … my … God,” she said.
We smiled.
“UPS,” she said.
I said, “What?”
“I phoned UPS for a pickup and there’s nobody in the office.”
“Well, never mind. We’re heading back there right now,” I told her.
I used the word “we” on purpose, although Dorothy would most likely depart before I entered the building.
But all Irene said was, “Thanks, Aaron. I must be getting Alzheimer’s.”
And off she went, without another word.
She would really have worried about Alzheimer’s if she had known what she’d just overlooked.
I glanced over at Dorothy, expecting her to share the joke, but she was pursuing her own line of thought. “Wild Strawberries,” she said, in a reflective tone of voice.
“Pardon?”
“That’s who Irene reminds me of. The woman in the old Bergman movie—the daughter-in-law, with the skinned-back bun. Remember her?”
“Ingrid Thulin,” I said.
Dorothy raised her eyebrows slightly, to show she was impressed, but it wasn’t so very difficult to dredge that name up. I had been enamored with Ingrid Thulin since college. I liked her cool, collected air.
“How long do you suppose it will be before Irene does a double take?” I asked Dorothy.
Dorothy merely shrugged.
She seemed to view our situation much more matter-of-factly than I did.
Maybe the reason I didn’t ask Dorothy why she had come back when she did was that I worried it would make her ask herself the same question. If she had just sort of wandered back, absentmindedly, the way you would return to an old address out of habit, then once I’d brought it up she might say, “Oh! My goodness! I should be going!”
Or maybe she would imagine I was asking what she was doing here. Why she had come back at all, in other words. Like when you ask a houseguest how long he’s planning to stay and he suspects you’re asking, “When can I hope to be rid of you?” Maybe that was why I felt it wouldn’t be polite.
It would kill me if she left. I had already gone through that once. I didn’t think I could do it all over again.
She was short and plump and serious-looking. She had a broad, olive-skinned face, appealingly flat-planed, and calm black eyes that were noticeably level, with that perfect symmetry that makes the viewer feel rested. Her hair, which she cut herself in a heedless, blunt, square style, was deeply, absolutely black, and all of a piece. (Her family had come from Mexico two generations before.) And yet I don’t think other people recognized how attractive she was, because she hid it. Or, no, not even that; she was too unaware of it to hide it. She wore owlish, round-lensed glasses that mocked the shape of her face. Her clothes made her figure seem squat—wide, straight trousers and man-tailored shirts, chunky crepe-soled shoes of a type that waitresses favored in diners. Only I noticed the creases as fine as silk threads that encircled her wrists and her neck. Only I knew her dear, pudgy feet, with the nails like tiny seashells.
My sister said Dorothy was too old for me, but that was just because I had foolishly told the truth when I was asked. Even though she was eight years my senior—forty-three when she died—she seemed younger, because of that good strong Hispanic skin. Plus, she had enough padding to fill out any lines. You wouldn’t really think about age at all, with Dorothy.
My sister also said she was too short for me, and it is undeniable that when Dorothy and I hugged, all the wrong parts of us met. I am six-feet-four. Dorothy was not quite five-one. If you saw us walking down the street together, my sister said, you would take us for a father and child heading off to grammar school.
And too professional, my sister said. Ha! There’s a novel objection. Dorothy was a doctor. I work as an editor in my family’s publishing firm. Not all that great a disparity, right? What Nandina meant was, too intent upon her profession. Too work-obsessed. She left for her office early, stayed late, didn’t greet me with my slippers in the evening, barely knew how to boil an egg. Fine with me.
But not with Nandina, evidently.
Maybe it was just a long, long way to travel, and that’s why it took Dorothy all those months to come back.
Or maybe she had first tried to do without me, the way I had first tried to do without her—to “get over” my loss, “find closure,” “move on,” all those ridiculous phrases people use when they’re urging you to endure the unendurable. But eventually, she had faced the fact that we simply missed each other too much. She had given in and returned.
That’s what I liked to believe.
· · ·
I’ve made my sister out to be a tyrant, but she really wasn’t. She just wanted the best for me, is why she was so critical. She saw the best in me. When a neighbor kid called me Frankenstein, after I got so tall, Nandina told me I resembled Abraham Lincoln. (I pretended to take heart from this, although Abraham Lincoln was not the look I’d been aiming for.) When I admitted to a case of nerves before inviting Tiffy Preveau to the freshman prom, Nandina rehearsed with me for hours, throwing herself into the role of Tiffy so convincingly that I all but lost my tongue around her. “Could—could—could—” I stammered.
“Start with an H word,” Nandina advised, slipping out of character for a moment.
“How—how would you like—to go to the prom with me?” I asked.
“Why, I’d love to, Aaron!” she said in a burbly, false voice. “But tell me: are you able to dance?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Because I really do love to dance, you know. And I’m talking fast-dance. I like to go crazy!”
“I can fast-dance,” I said.
And I could. Nandina had taught me. Nandina was not exactly a teen success story herself (she stood nearly six feet tall even after shucking off her long banana shoes, and had reached her senior year without attending a single one of her own proms), but she steered me through a series of passable-looking moves. She showed me how to bite my lower lip as if transported by the beat of “Pump Up the Volume,” and she positioned my right arm so it seemed less like a broken wing and more like a banner, raised triumphantly as high as she could force it. It worked in my favor that nobody was dancing in that walking-embrace style anymore. I wouldn’t need to clasp my partner two-handed or anything like that.
And I should learn to do without all those C words, Nandina said. It seemed to her I was piling them on deliberately—“can” and “could,” every chance I got.
“That might not be entirely coincidental,” I told her. (I spoke almost without a hitch, since she was merely my sister again.)
“See what I mean? You could just as well have used ‘accidental’ there,” she said.
Tiffy turned down my invitation, as it happened. She said she’d already made plans. But still, it was kind of Nandina to offer her help.
I was wrong to use the word “handicaps” earlier. “Differences” would have been more accurate. Really I’m not handicapped in the least.
I may be different from other people but I’m no unluckier. I believe that. Or I’m unluckier but no unhappier. That is probably closer to the truth.
Sometimes I think I am unluckier than other people but much, much happier.
But there I suppose I’m fooling myself, because probably everyone thinks he has some unique claim on happiness.
The weird thing is that, although I have been this way for as long as I can remember, I feel myself to be exactly like everyone else. Staring out through the windows of my eyes, I imagine my back to be straight, my neck upright, and my arms of a matching diameter. In actuality, though, since my right foot and calf are pretty much deadweight I have to drag my right leg behind me, and I lean away from that side to counterbalance it, which throws my spine askew. When I’m seated, you might not guess, but then I stand up and I’m listing.
I own a cane, but I keep leaving it places.
And although I have trained myself to let my right arm hang as loosely as possible, it insists on reverting to a tucked position with the hand bent inward, folded sharply at the wrist as if I were a stroke victim. Maybe I am a stroke victim; I don’t know. I was a perfectly normal two-year-old; then I came down with the flu. After that I wasn’t normal anymore.
But I’ll bet I would have been left-handed in any case, because I have excellent penmanship and I didn’t need to struggle for it. So in that respect I am not so unlucky, wouldn’t you agree? And I play a wicked game of racquetball, and I can swim well enough to stay afloat, at least, and I drive a car much better than most if I do say so myself. My car has modified foot pedals. For steering and shifting, though, I get along fine with the standard hand controls. New passengers tend to look anxious at first; then, after we’ve gone a few miles, they forget all about it.
I daydream of switching to standard pedals, but the Motor Vehicle people have these absurd regulations.
It occurred to me at the beginning that Dorothy might have come back on some special assignment. She’d been permitted to return just long enough to tell me something, perhaps, after which she would be on her way. (I have to say right now that who had permitted her was not something I cared to dwell on. I am an atheist. Having her here in the first place had already shaken up more preconceptions than I could easily absorb.)