The Accidental Tourist

It was a pity Edward couldn’t do the same. Macon hated walking him; Edward had never been trained to heel and kept winding his leash around Macon’s legs. Oh, dogs were so much trouble. Dogs ate mammoth amounts of food, too; Edward’s kibble had to be lugged home from the supermarket, dragged out of the car trunk and up the steep front steps and through the house to the pantry. But for that, at least, Macon finally thought of a solution. At the foot of the old coal chute in the basement he set a plastic trash can, with a square cut out of the bottom. Then he poured the remainder of a sack of kibble into the trash can, which magically became a continuous feeder like the cat’s. Next time he bought dog food, he could just drive around to the side of the house and send it rattling down the coal chute.

The only hitch was, Edward turned out to be scared of the basement. Every morning he went to the pantry where his breakfast used to be served, and he sat on his fat little haunches and whimpered. Macon had to carry him bodily down the basement stairs, staggering slightly while Edward scrabbled in his arms. Since the whole idea had been to spare Macon’s trick back, he felt he’d defeated his purpose. Still, he kept trying.

Also with his back in mind, he tied the clothes basket to Ethan’s old skateboard and he dropped a drawstring bag down the laundry chute at the end of a rope. This meant he never had to carry the laundry either up or down the stairs, or even across the basement. Sometimes, though — laboriously scooting the wheeled basket from the clothesline to the laundry chute, stuffing clean sheets into the bag, running upstairs to haul them in by the long, stiff rope — Macon felt a twinge of embarrassment. Was it possible that this might be sort of silly?

Well, everything was silly, when you got right down to it.

The neighborhood must have learned by now that Sarah had left him. People started telephoning on ordinary weeknights and inviting him to take “potluck” with them. Macon thought at first they meant one of those arrangements where everybody brings a different pot of something and if you’re lucky you end up with a balanced meal. He arrived at Bob and Sue Carney’s with a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Since Sue was serving spaghetti, he didn’t feel he’d been all that lucky. She set his macaroni at one end of the table and no one ate it but Delilah, the three-year-old. She had several helpings, though.

Macon hadn’t expected to find the children at the table. He saw he was somebody different now, some kind of bachelor uncle who was assumed to need a glimpse of family life from time to time. But the fact was, he had never much liked other people’s children. And gatherings of any sort depressed him. Physical contact with people not related to him — an arm around his shoulder, a hand on his sleeve — made him draw inward like a snail. “You know, Macon,” Sue Carney said, leaning across the table to pat his wrist, “whenever you get the urge, you’re welcome to drop in on us. Don’t wait for an invitation.”

“That’s nice of you, Sue,” he said. He wondered why it was that outsiders’ skin felt so unreal — almost waxy, as if there were an invisible extra layer between him and them. As soon as possible, he moved his wrist.

“If you could live any way you wanted,” Sarah had once told him, “I suppose you’d end up on a desert island with no other human beings.”

“Why! That’s not true at all,” he’d said. “I’d have you, and Ethan, and my sister and brothers…”

“But no people. I mean, people there just by chance, people you didn’t know.”

“Well, no, I guess not,” he’d said. “Would you?”

But of course she would — back then. Back before Ethan died. She’d always been a social person. When there was nothing else to do she’d stroll happily through a shopping mall — Macon’s notion of hell, with all those strangers’ shoulders brushing his. Sarah thought crowds were exciting. She liked to meet new people. She was fond of parties, even cocktail parties. You’d have to be crazy to like cocktail parties, Macon thought — those scenes of confusion she used to drag him to, where he was made to feel guilty if he managed by some fluke to get involved in a conversation of any depth. “Circulate. Circulate,” Sarah would hiss, passing behind him with her drink.

That had changed during this past year. Sarah didn’t like crowds anymore. She never went near a mall, hadn’t made him go to any parties. They attended only quiet little dinners and she herself had not given a dinner since Ethan died. He’d asked her once, “Shouldn’t we have the Smiths and Millards over? They’ve had us so often.”

Sarah said, “Yes. You’re right. Pretty soon.” And then did nothing about it.

He and she had met at a party. They’d been seventeen years old. It was one of those mixer things, combining their two schools. Even at that age Macon had disliked parties, but he was secretly longing to fall in love and so he had braved this mixer but then stood off in a corner looking unconcerned, he hoped, and sipping his ginger ale. It was 1958. The rest of the world was in button-down shirts, but Macon wore a black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and sandals. (He was passing through his poet stage.) And Sarah, a bubbly girl with a tumble of copper- brown curls and a round face, large blue eyes, a plump lower lip — she wore something pink, he remembered, that made her skin look radiant. She was ringed by admiring boys. She was short and tidily made, and there was something plucky about the way her little tan calves were so firmly braced, as if she were determined that this looming flock of basketball stars and football stars would not bowl her over. Macon gave up on her at once. No, not even that — he didn’t even consider her, not for a single second, but gazed beyond her to other, more attainable girls. So it had to be Sarah who made the first move. She came over to him and asked what he was acting so stuck-up about. “Stuck-up!” he said. “I’m not stuck-up.”

“You sure do look it.”

“No, I’m just… bored,” he told her.

“Well, so do you want to dance, or not?”

They danced. He was so unprepared that it passed in a blur. He enjoyed it only later, back home, where he could think it over in a calmer state of mind. And thinking it over, he saw that if he hadn’t looked stuck-up she never would have noticed him. He was the only boy who had not openly pursued her. He would be wise not to pursue her in the future; not to seem too eager, not to show his feelings. With Sarah you had to keep your dignity, he sensed.

Lord knows, though, keeping his dignity wasn’t easy. Macon lived with his grandparents, and they believed that no one under eighteen ought to have a driver’s license. (Never mind if the state of Maryland felt otherwise.) So Grandfather Leary drove Macon and Sarah on their dates. His car was a long black Buick with a velvety gray backseat on which Macon sat all by himself, for his grandfather considered it unseemly for the two of them to sit there together. “I am not your hired chauffeur,” he said, “and besides, the backseat has connotations.” (Much of Macon’s youth was ruled by connotations.) So Macon sat alone in back and Sarah sat up front with Grandfather Leary. Her cloud of hair, seen against the glare of oncoming headlights, reminded Macon of a burning bush. He would lean forward, clear his throat, and ask, “Um, did you finish your term paper?”

Sarah would say, “Pardon?”

“Term paper,” Grandfather Leary would tell her. “Boy wants to know if you finished it.”

“Oh. Yes, I finished it.”

“She finished it,” Grandfather Leary relayed to Macon.

“I do have ears, Grandfather.”

“You want to get out and walk? Because I don’t have to stand for any mouthing off. I could be home with my loved ones, not motoring around in the dark.”

“Sorry, Grandfather.”

Macon’s only hope was silence. He sat back, still and aloof, knowing that when Sarah looked she’d see nothing but a gleam of blond hair and a blank face — the rest darkness, his black turtleneck blending into the shadows. It worked. “What do you think about all the time?” she asked in his ear as they two-stepped around her school gym. He only quirked a corner of his mouth, as if amused, and didn’t answer.

Things weren’t much different when he got his license. Things weren’t much different when he went away to college, though he did give up his black turtlenecks and turn into a Princeton man, crisply, casually attired in white shirts and khakis. Separated from Sarah, he felt a constant hollowness, but in his letters he talked only about his studies. Sarah, home at Goucher, wrote back, Don’t you miss me a little? I can’t go anywhere we’ve been for fear I’ll see you looking so mysterious across the room. She signed her letters I love you and he signed his Fondly. At night he dreamed she lay next to him, her curls making a whispery sound against his pillow, although all they’d done in real life was a lengthy amount of kissing. He wasn’t sure, to tell the truth, that he could manage much more without… how did they put it in those days? Losing his cool. Sometimes, he was almost angry with Sarah. He felt he’d been backed into a false position. He was forced to present this impassive front if he wanted her to love him. Oh, so much was expected of men!

She wrote she wasn’t dating other people. Neither was Macon, but of course he didn’t say so. He came home in the summer and worked at his grandfather’s factory; Sarah worked on a tan at the neighborhood pool. Halfway