Three Days in June

by Anne Tyler

I am very alert to people’s tones of voice.

(Another of my strengths is that I have a very good audial memory, including for my own words.) “What more did you require of me?” “I ‘required’ nothing at all,” she said, and now her chin was practically pointed at the ceiling. “All I’m saying is, to head a private girls’ school you need tact. You need diplomacy. You need to avoid saying things like ‘Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realize your daughter doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton.’ ” “Katy Morris couldn’t get into a decent trade school,” I said.

It was the evening of my daughter’s wedding rehearsal, with dinner to follow.

I knew that what I needed was a place I could maintain on my own without needing to count on Max.

The clock gathered itself together with a whirring of gears and struck a series of blurry notes.

“This one is too new.” “It’s a kitten?” “No, no, it’s old.” “You just said—”

“It’s an elderly female cat who belonged to a very old woman, and now the woman has up and died and the cat is in mourning,” he told me.

“You can’t name a cat ‘Pearl.’ ” “Why not?” “Cats are so bad at language,” I told him. “They’re not the least bit like dogs. Cats just get your general tone, and ‘Pearl’ has a tone like a growl.”

“You can advise me on cat lore,” he said. “Plus you might even decide to adopt her; who knows?”

“I most emphatically do not want her,” I said. Then, “Nor do I want a houseguest.”

“What’s up with Marilee?” Max asked. He’d never been very good at minding his own business.

“Your great talent is for teaching;

I turned back to the cat. She was a bread-loaf shape in the armchair now with her front paws folded beneath her, and when she saw me looking at her she shut her eyes lazily and then opened them again.

“No, see,” he said, “this is where you always go wrong. You just…take something I say and run with it, just totally misinterpret it. There’s no reasoning with you!”

Wouldn’t you know he had parked so close behind me that I had to perform about six maneuvers before I could take off.

Debbie stayed silent, which was her usual tactic whenever I complained to her about Max.

It seemed there were tears in my eyes, but I couldn’t say why.

He’s got me walking two miles every morning and cutting down on my salt and doing geckos.” “Doing what?” “Like, when you tighten all your pelvic floor muscles and then relax them,” he said. “Oh, Kegels,” I said. “Right. Kegels.” He slid his spatula under a sandwich and gave it a flip. “Tighten your pelvic muscles three seconds and then relax three seconds, tighten and then—” “In fact, I’ve just now done one,” I announced. “Yes, me too,” he said. We both snickered. I’d forgotten how cozy it felt sometimes, hanging out with Max.

“Of course you’ve been crying,” he said. “You’re losing your only daughter. It’s completely understandable.” “I’m not losing her!” “In a manner of speaking, you are,” he said. “No, not even in a manner of speaking. She’ll be twenty minutes away from me, exactly like before, and she’s adding a guy to our family whom I get along with very well.” “But he’ll use up all her time,” Max said. “And he’ll expect her to come to his family for holidays and such and you’ll practically never see her again.”

Boundaries; that was his problem. He lacked boundaries. I myself was all about boundaries.

Several inches of snow were supposed to fall before evening, so all the other parked cars were sticking their windshield wipers straight up like soldiers in surrender, and the city had a startled, suspenseful feeling as if it were holding its breath.

But children veer out from their parents like so many explorers in the wilderness, I’ve learned. They’re not mere duplicates of them.

The cat, meanwhile, disappeared—just melted away, as cats do.

“All I’m saying is—” “Forget it, Mom,” Debbie told me. “Apparently we’re dealing with one of those gender-gap things.” “Now, that’s just plain insulting,” Max said. “I refuse to stand in for your notion of a male chauvinist.”

“Please hear me out for one minute.” Debbie grew very attentive, but in an ostentatious way. She sat up extra straight and fixed him with a wide stare.

I’d been scared of the wrong thing, it turned out. Not that Debbie would marry Kenneth even after he’d betrayed her, but that she would take his word for it when he claimed he hadn’t.

Everything Sophie said, as a rule, was about three degrees too vivacious. It seemed that she lived on some other level than ours, someplace louder and more brightly lit.

Except he’d had a full beard back then, and coal-black hair that nearly reached his waist. “My goodness!” I said. He hadn’t been half so handsome in those days, at least not that I’d been able to see under all that fur. And he had certainly not worn such a dignified suit.

Were we simply going to carry on as usual, then? As if nothing whatsoever had happened?

I’m a worrier; I admit it. I’m always jumping to the worst-case scenario. But this time, I swear I had good reason. I swear he was trying to find out if she had believed his story, and he suspected that she had not. And what’s more, he was right: she had not. She was distinctly unhappy.

“Now, the maid of honor,” she went on. “Elizabeth? Was that her name? Goodness, she certainly doesn’t have her mother’s sense of style.” “Well, let’s see what she looks like tomorrow,” I said. “I doubt she’ll do much better,” Mom told me. This was sort of a satisfaction. I still held Elizabeth to blame for making Debbie unhappy. I wished I could give Debbie a magic amnesia pill. I wished I had an amnesia pill myself.

“I was wondering if Debbie might call,” I said finally. “She won’t call.” “Just to rehash the rehearsal, I mean.” “Not going to happen,” he said. He chose a can of Old Dundalk and closed the fridge door. You would think the man lived here.

Max was right: she wasn’t going to call. Why should she call? She had her own separate life now. She always had.

Anger feels so much better than sadness. Cleaner, somehow, and more definite. But then when the anger fades, the sadness comes right back again the same as ever.

Oh, yes, another of Max’s flaws was that he was fond of recounting his dreams, and they were always interminable. Now he said, as he served up my share of the omelet, “I dreamed I sent my principal a sympathy note but then I realized no one had died.”

He studied me. “What you need,” he said finally, “is a thunder jacket.” “A what?” “One of those really snug jackets they put on dogs who are scared of thunder. I mean, good grief! Do you keep an itemized list of things to worry about? How do you remember them all?” “But wouldn’t this jacket have four sleeves?” I asked. “What’ll I do with the extra two?” “Add that to your worry list,” he suggested. I laughed and stood up to fetch the coffeepot.

“Do you suppose she’s going over to their side?” “What side is that?” he asked. “Just…you know. Different from us.”

And I can just about guarantee that if they had lived long enough to witness our divorce, they would have told Max, “No surprise to us!”

I was just feeling jealous because I worried Debbie might start preferring her to me.

“Perfectly,” I corrected her. I didn’t let on that I’d been fielding such complaints for most of my life. Couldn’t I ever settle for just okay? I’d been asked more than once.

My eyes were quirked into triangles and so many lines crossed my forehead that it resembled a sheet of ruled paper.

I wondered why it was that I had so many irritating people in my life.

Out in the foyer a small crowd was gathering now around the bridal couple, but it wasn’t my kind of scene, to be honest, or Max’s either, and so eventually we looked at each other and I said, “Well? Should we be heading to the reception?”

isn’t that how it works, for most couples? You don’t start out with someone next to you; you start out all alone. You go through infancy and childhood and adolescence, as a rule, before you meet your other person.

Could I have this dance, for the rest of my life? What a cataclysmic question, when you stopped to think about it. I wondered how it was that anyone on earth ever found the courage to marry.

“What can I say,” I told her. Because one of life’s frustrations is that sometimes, it’s best to say nothing.

Sometimes when I find out what’s on other people’s minds I honestly wonder if we all live on totally separate planets.

He’d been hired to replace June Cannon, who’d retired the previous spring at the age of (I’m guessing here) a hundred and five.

The point is, Max was not fully present right then.

He had a tendency to wander off course halfway through a project, as if his life were just a casual experiment.