Free The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler Page A

the crib on one of his restless journeys, he took Lindy’s blanket from the railing and shook it straight and folded it. They needed neatness, too. You couldn’t raise a child in chaos and then expect her to view the world as a stable, secure place. They needed the edges matched and the corners squared. They needed to feel certain that things were where they belonged.
    He heard his mother emerge from the bathroom, hesitate in the hall, and then proceed to her own room—her slow, vague footsteps in heavy shoes. He should go back out to wish her good night, but it required too much effort. He heard her door latch shut in a way that seemed to him reproachful and resigned.
    Lindy’s blanket was one Pauline had sewn when she was pregnant, binding a length of pale-yellow wool with yellow satin on all four sides because, she said, babies loved to run their fingers across something smooth and slippery when they were trying to go to sleep. She somehow knew things like that. She knew that very young babies worried they’d fall apart; they liked to be wrapped into cylinders like stuffed cabbage leaves. She knew the level of voice they preferred—higher-pitched but not shrill—and she knew that while a swaying motion could be soothing, an up-and-down motion would cause a baby to stiffen every muscle.
    Michael had no idea where she had learned all this. He suspected that she hadn’t learned it—that it came from a natural, inborn fund of empathy.
    He laid the folded blanket at the foot of the crib. He adjusted the green cloth frog that sat at the head. It was Pauline’s frog, from her childhood. It had a faded, floppy, rubbed-bald look; you could tell it had been well loved. A gap at one corner of the stitched-on mouth turned its smile into a lopsided grin. The right arm had been reat-tached with brighter-green thread.
    She was a rememberer and a saver and a compulsive souvenir keeper. She still had the red tin cricket from the box of Cracker Jack that he’d bought her on their first date. She had a cone-shaped paper cup, flattened now into a pie wedge, from the train they’d ridden on their honeymoon trip to Washington, D.C.
    He circled the room, gathering further evidence of what kind of person she was. The laughing, affectionate faces of her friends in the snapshots tucked in the mirror. The fountain of maidenhair fern burgeoning on the windowsill. (She could grow anything, anywhere. Her victory garden in the backyard—a yard the size of a scatter rug! packed as hard as a pavement!—had produced so many vegetables last summer that they had had extras to sell in the store. Although half the time, she had spontaneously given them to the neighbors before Michael could collect them.)
    In the evenings, often, she and his mother put their heads together over one of her magazines and they would get the giggles. Anything might set them off—an extreme fashion photo or a ludicrous household hint. “‘Saving your silk stockings to donate for the war effort?’” Pauline would quote. “‘Crochet this lovely drawstring sack embroidered in a botanical theme to store them attractively out of sight!’” His mother would double over and make little snuffling sounds, shyly covering her mouth with one hand, her eyes two merry slits. Michael couldn’t remember seeing his mother giggle before, not even when his father and his brother were alive. Only Pauline called up that sense of mirth in her.
    He heard the tin alarm clock ticking away on the nightstand—every hollow, slow tick. Other than that, the room was silent. It was a silence that seemed directed toward him personally. “See there?” it asked. “See how little you would have, if you didn’t have Pauline?”
    He took his jacket from the closet, and he opened the bedroom door and walked out.
    Yes, it was surely going to snow. He could tell by the color of the sky—a pinkish tinge underlying the gray, like the pink in a hand-tinted photograph. There was a flinty smell to