The Accidental Tourist

“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 through that summer, she said she wondered why he’d never asked to sleep with her. Macon thought about that and then said, levelly, that in fact he’d like to ask her now. They went to her parents’ house; her parents were vacationing in Rehoboth. They climbed the stairs to her little bedroom, all white ruffles and hot sunlight baking the smell of fresh paint. “Did you bring a whatchamacallit?” Sarah asked, and Macon, unwilling to admit that he hardly knew what one looked like, barked, “No, I didn’t bring a whatchamacallit, who do you think I am?”—a senseless question, if you stopped to examine it, but Sarah took it to mean that he was shocked by her, that he thought her too forward, and she said, “Well, excuse me for living!” and ran down the stairs and out of the house. It took him half an hour to find her, and longer than that to make her stop crying. Really, he said, he’d only been thinking of her welfare: In his experience, whatchamacallits weren’t all that safe. He tried to sound knowledgeable and immune to passions of the moment. He suggested she visit a doctor he knew — it happened to be the doctor who treated his grandmother’s Female Complaint. Sarah dried her tears and borrowed Macon’s pen to write the doctor’s name on the back of a chewing gum wrapper. But wouldn’t the doctor refuse her? she asked. Wouldn’t he say she ought to be at least engaged? Well, all right, Macon said, they would get engaged. Sarah said that would be lovely.

Their engagement lasted three years, all through college. Grandfather Leary felt the wedding should be delayed even further, till Macon was firmly settled in his place of employment; but since his place of employment would be Leary Metals, which manufactured cork-lined caps for soft drink bottles, Macon couldn’t see himself concentrating on that even briefly. Besides, the rush to and from Sarah’s bedroom on her mother’s Red Cross days had begun to tell on them both.

So they married the spring they graduated from college, and Macon went to work at the factory while Sarah taught English at a private school. It was seven years before Ethan was born. By that time, Sarah was no longer calling Macon “mysterious.” When he was quiet now it seemed to annoy her. Macon sensed this, but there was nothing he could do about it. In some odd way, he was locked inside the standoffish self he’d assumed when he and she first met. He was frozen there. It was like that old warning of his grandmother’s: Don’t cross your eyes, they might get stuck that way. No matter how he tried to change his manner, Sarah continued to deal with him as if he were someone unnaturally cool-headed, someone more even in temperament than she but perhaps not quite as feeling.