The Accidental Tourist

So every morning, Macon rose and dressed before Alexander woke. He started fixing breakfast and then roused him. “Seven o’clock! Time to get up! Go call your mother, will you?” In the past, he learned, Muriel had often stayed in bed while Alexander woke up on his own and got ready for school. Sometimes he left the house while she was still asleep. Macon thought that was shocking. Now he made a full breakfast, and he insisted that Muriel sit at the table with them. Muriel claimed breakfast made her sick to her stomach. Alexander said it made him sick, too, but Macon said that was just too bad. “Ninety-eight percent of all A students eat eggs in the morning,” he said (making it up as he went along). “Ninety-nine percent drink milk.” He untied his apron and sat down. “Are you listening, Alexander?”

“I’ll throw up if I drink milk.”

“That’s all in your head.”

“Tell him, Mama!”

“He throws up,” Muriel said gloomily. She sat hunched at the table in her long silk robe, resting her chin on one hand. “It’s something to do with enzymes,” she said. She yawned. Her hair, growing out of its permanent at last, hung down her back in even ripples like the crimps on a bobby pin.

Alexander walked to school with Buddy and Sissy Ebbetts, two tough-looking older children from across the street. Muriel either went back to bed or dressed and left for one or another of her jobs, depending on what day it was. Then Macon did the breakfast dishes and took Edward out. They didn’t go far; it was much too cold. The few people they encountered walked rapidly, with jerky steps, like characters in a silent film. They knew Macon by sight now and would allow their eyes to flick over his face as they passed — a gesture like a nod — but they didn’t speak. Edward ignored them. Other dogs could come up and sniff him and he wouldn’t even break stride. Mr. Marcusi, unloading crates outside Marcusi’s Grocery, would pause to say, “Well, hey there, stubby. Hey there, tub of lard.” Edward, smugly oblivious, marched on. “Weirdest animal I ever saw,” Mr. Marcusi called after Macon. “Looks like something that was badly drawn.” Macon always laughed.

He was beginning to feel easier here. Singleton Street still unnerved him with its poverty and its ugliness, but it no longer seemed so dangerous. He saw that the hoodlums in front of the Cheery Moments Carry-Out were pathetically young and shabby— their lips chapped, their sparse whiskers ineptly shaved, an uncertain, unformed look around their eyes. He saw that once the men had gone off to work, the women emerged full of good intentions and swept their front walks, picked up the beer cans and potato chip bags, even rolled back their coat sleeves and scrubbed their stoops on the coldest days of the year. Children raced past like so many scraps of paper blowing in the wind — mittens mismatched, noses running — and some woman would brace herself on her broom to call, “You there! I see you! Don’t think I don’t know you’re skipping school!” For this street was always backsliding, Macon saw, always falling behind, but was caught just in time by these women with their carrying voices and their pushy jaws.

Returning to Muriel’s house, he would warm himself with a cup of coffee. He would set his typewriter on the kitchen table and sit down with his notes and brochures. The window next to the table had large, cloudy panes that rattled whenever the wind blew. Something about the rattling sound reminded him of train travel. The airport in Atlanta must have ten miles of corridors, he typed, and then a gust shook the panes and he had an eerie sensation of movement, as if the cracked linoleum floor were skating out from under him.

He would telephone hotels, motels, Departments of Commerce, and his travel agent, arranging future trips. He would note these arrangements in the datebook that Julian gave him every Christmas — a Businessman’s Press product, spiral-bound. In the back were various handy reference charts that he liked to thumb through. The birthstone for January was a garnet; for February, an amethyst. One square mile equaled 2.59 square kilometers. The proper gift for a first anniversary was paper. He would ponder these facts dreamily. It seemed to him that the world was full of equations; that there must be an answer for everything, if only you knew how to set forth the questions.

Then it was lunchtime, and he would put away his work and make himself a sandwich or heat a can of soup, let Edward have a quick run in the tiny backyard. After that he liked to putter around the house a bit. There was so much that needed fixing! And all of it somebody else’s, not his concern, so he could approach it lightheartedly. He whistled while he probed the depth of a crack. He hummed as he toured the basement, shaking his head at the disarray. Upstairs he found a three-legged bureau leaning on a can of tomatoes, and he told Edward, “Scandalous!” in a tone of satisfaction.