Three Days in June

by Anne Tyler

Besides which, he thought I’d hung the moon. It’s hard to resist someone who thinks you hung the moon.

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

People don’t warn you ahead of time that some days your face will be netted with wrinkles and other days almost smooth.

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.

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

“Max,” I said. “I appreciate the thought. But the fact is that I believe I have only one span of life allotted to me. I don’t feel I have the option of just…trying out various random ideas and giving up if they don’t work out.” “Yes, well,” Max said with a sigh. He himself, apparently, assumed he had an infinite number of lives.

Max said, “Haven’t these past three days felt like going backward in time together?” “Like Groundhog Day,” I agreed. “Groundhog Day?” He looked puzzled. “Scared of our shadows?” “Groundhog Day the movie,” I told him. Count on Max; he wasn’t much of a moviegoer. “Where people live through the same one day over and over until they get it right.”

“The people in Groundhog Day. How many times till they got it right?” “Lots,” I said. “I lost count, in fact.” “Wouldn’t that be great?” he asked me. “If the world really worked that way?” I’d been about to say that it had taken them so many times that I had very nearly walked out of the movie in the middle, but instead I said, “Well, yes, it would, I guess.”

“Cats are not coldhearted!” I said. “They’re only protecting their dignity, in case they get rejected. ‘I’ll just reject you first,’ they’re saying.” “Yes, so you’ve always told me.”

I’m too young for this, I thought. Not too old, as you might expect, but too young, too inept, too uninformed. How come there weren’t any grownups around? Why did everyone just assume I knew what I was doing?