Celestial Navigation (34 page)

This house is back to its beginnings now. Lonely boarders thumb through magazines in the kitchen while they wait for their canned soup to heat. The television runs nearly all night, hissing its test pattern to a fat man asleep in an armchair. There are yellowed newspapers stacked on the window-seat and candy wrappers in the ashtrays, and this morning when I came down to breakfast I removed a pair of dirty socks from the bottom stairstep and laid them on the newel post, where I suspect they will stay forever.

The house is the same but the street is changing. Getting younger. Old people are dwindling. The few that are left pick their way down the sidewalk like shadows, whispering courage to themselves and clutching their string shopping bags full of treasure. There goes the lame lady who lives above the grocery store in a room full of cats and birds and goldfish. There goes our boarder Mr. Houck, who thins himself to a pencil line when passing a black harmonica player. Miss
Cohen, with her widowed mother. The bald man with the ivory-handled cane. All flinching beneath the cool eyes of the boy in dungarees who sits on a stoop fiddling with his ropes of colored beads.

Sometimes I invite Jeremy to come to the grocery store with me. I tell him it will do him good. I call him down from his studio, from his great towering beautiful sculptures, and help him into his jacket and offer my arm for support. We go very slowly. He is not used to walking much. He tends to whisper instead of speaking out, and even once we are inside the grocery store he whispers to Mrs. Dowd. What would be good to buy today? Her day-old pies? Anything will be all right. We head toward home again, arm in arm. We trundle down the sidewalk like two clay ducks, and the boy on the stoop yawns and reaches for a beer. If he looks at us at all he sees only an elderly couple, together no doubt for centuries, arriving at the end of their dusty and unremarkable lives. The woman’s cardigan is drab and frayed. The man wears crocheted bedroom slippers. He seems peaceful but distant, detached from his surroundings. The boy starts whistling a lighthearted tune, and he goes on whistling long after the elderly couple has turned in at the house near the corner and locked the door and drawn the window shades.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A
NNE
T
YLER
was born in Minneapolis in 1941 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s sixteenth novel; her eleventh,
Breathing Lessons
, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore.