Three Days in June

by Anne Tyler

“This salad is delicious, by the way.” “Why, thank you. I was impressed that you had hearts of palm in your cupboard.” “I did?” “Shoot,” he said. “Maybe I should have checked the expiration date.” “You know I don’t believe in expiration dates,” I told him. “Remember our wedding?” he asked. “We didn’t have a wedding,” I said. “We most certainly did. We had a lovely private ceremony in city hall.” “Ah, yes. You wore jeans and a dashiki,” I said. “You wore all black, with black tights.”

I said, “Did you show the cat where you were putting her litter box?” “I’m sure she’ll figure it out,” he said. I glanced toward the powder room. “With the door shut?” I asked him. “Oh,” he said. I stood up and went to open the door. The litter box sat next to the toilet, filled with kitty litter but pristine.

Also, he was forever nibbling at things in the fridge that didn’t belong to him. One time he consumed the entire contents of a jar labeled CAUTION—SEWAGE SAMPLE because he figured it was just a ruse to protect somebody’s chicken soup. Actually, it was just a ruse, but wouldn’t you think he’d have been embarrassed that the owner felt a ruse was necessary?

Boundaries; that was his problem. He lacked boundaries. I myself was all about boundaries. Still, I couldn’t help liking him. He was exceptionally kindhearted with both animals and children, and he had a sweet, trusting face—beardless, back then—and he was happy to share anything in his possession, anything at all. Besides which, he thought I’d hung the moon. It’s hard to resist someone who thinks you hung the moon. “Oh, Gail is reading that too!” he would say to an acquaintance. “Gail reads everything; you wouldn’t believe how much.”

I would rehearse how I would explain to him that we had no future together. Partly, this was because he often struck me as a case of arrested development. A man nearing thirty, still renting a room in a houseful of single women! Still experimenting with new professions, new avenues of enthusiasm! Why, merely getting through college had taken him six years, because he’d kept switching majors. Also, he was just as annoying a housemate as he’d ever been. No amount of nagging from the rest of us altered his behavior in the slightest.

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.

But here’s what was weird: for one split second there, I’d thought it was Max at the door. I had felt this stab of outrage: Was there no escaping the man? 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.

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

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.

In fact, a cross-cultural issue seemed to be the subject of the current conversation. Marie-Louise, who had just waved away the offering of a second dinner roll, asked seemingly out of the blue if Americans used the word ‘fool’ in polite society. Everyone looked puzzled, but Max said, “I do remember that we weren’t allowed to say fool in front of my great-aunt. She was a foot-washing Baptist, and she claimed there’s a passage in the Bible that expressly forbids it.” “Ah,” Marie-Louise said. “Thank you for straightening this out. We were always told as children that after a large meal we should never say we were fool.” The others fell silent, briefly. Then my mother asked, “Because you were…fool of food?” “Yes.” A soft “Oh!” traveled around the table.

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

“Gail,” he said, the instant I opened the door, “what is it? Did Max find out about us?” I despised that question! So gossipy, so intrusive. And what right did he have to call Max by his first name? They hadn’t even met! It was all I could do to say, “Yes, Andrew, he did. Sorry; I meant what I said in my email.” Then I shut the door in his face. After that, we were two strangers.

And in the spring, when he began to be seen around and about with Mamie Fox from the Spanish department, I felt nothing but relief. It was as if he had been burned out of me. Seared out. There was nothing left of him. It did occur to me that it might be fear that made me feel this way—fear of losing everything I valued most—and I wondered if maybe much later I would allow myself to mourn him. But in fact, that never happened.

Why had I, who truly loved my husband—at least in the on-again-off-again, maybe/maybe-not, semi-happy way of just about any married woman—broken apart my whole world for a man I never really knew? But maybe that was just it: I hadn’t known him. There are times when that can be the strongest draw of all.

I said, “Is it okay that we’re eating all these scrambled eggs and omelets and such?” “Why wouldn’t it be?” he asked. “Aren’t they bad for our cholesterol or something?” “That was last week,” he told me. “Everything’s changed.” He dished out a serving for me and then put the other half on his own plate. Meanwhile, I got up to retrieve the toast from the toaster. “Face it, though,” he said. “You’ll have a better chance of being hired if you don’t have a break-and-enter on your record.” “It wouldn’t literally be breaking and entering,” I said. “I do own a key, you realize.” “Even so,” he said.

I said, “I hate forgetting words. Hunting through my memory for them; it’s like asking the Magic 8 Ball, you know? ‘Will I be rich when I’m grown?’ ‘Will I travel?’ And then waiting for the answer to float up slowly, slowly in the glass.” “ ‘It is not yet clear,’ ” Max intoned in a solemn voice. “ ‘Ask again later.’ ” “But at least it did float up, when I was young. Now that I’m old, it sometimes doesn’t. I’ll say, ‘It will come to me by and by,’ but it doesn’t.”

“I hate it,” I told him. He looked over at me. I said, “It makes me feel…vulnerable.” “Oh,” he said. “Sweetheart.” “But you’re right: welcome to the club!” I said.

“You and I were going to grow old side by side, once upon a time,” Max said. I don’t know where he expected that remark to go. I didn’t answer, and we walked the rest of the way in silence.

Someday I’d like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have said.

Because by now we were nearing the restaurant. The façade was unchanged—a white clapboard cube with a neon crab in a chef’s toque dancing on the roof—but the space out front had become a jumble of tables and chairs and collapsed umbrellas, all bordered by the trash bins and newspaper boxes lined up as usual along the edge of the curb. “Paris, France,” he said with a wave. “I see,” I said. “Just don’t tell them you’re too fool.”

That’s something you forget when you’ve been on your own awhile: those married-couple conversations that continue intermittently for weeks, sometimes, branching out and doubling back and looping into earlier strands like a piece of crochet work.

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?

The year was 2023, and nearly every man, woman, and child in America owned a cell phone, including Max Baines. He could have called me while he was driving. Or pulled over to the side of the road and called. Or even waited till he got home and called me then. And yet here he was in person, standing on my front porch. Which gave me the courage, finally, to step out onto the porch myself and cup his face in my hands. I studied his sweet, bristly cheeks, and the satiny skin below his brown eyes, and his forehead creased with concern, and I committed them all to memory before I kissed him.