The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler Page B

Mother Anton were napping, and the older children were playing on the swing set in the backyard. Pauline had to fix a whole separate meal, tuna salad hurriedly assembled and coleslaw left over from yesterday, and although she had eaten with the others she couldn’t stop herself from picking at the tuna as she sat keeping Michael company.
    “Mrs. Dimity, her name was,” she said. “Whenever I came by their house, she would serve me tea in her best china cups. She gave me perfume for my birthday, a bottle of Amour Amour that my parents wouldn’t let me wear.”
    “ Who was this?” Michael asked. He had been reaching for the coleslaw, but he stopped now to look at her.
    “I told you. Mrs. Dimity.”
    “But whose mother, I meant.”
    “This boy from my church named Rodney.”
    “You never mentioned any boy from your church.”
    “Didn’t I? His mother had seven sons and no daughters. She always said she wished I were her daughter.”
    “You never breathed a word about a boy from your church! You claim you’ve told me about everybody you were ever involved with, but I never heard about a boy from your church until this instant.”
    “Oh, well, involved,” Pauline said. “We were thirteen years old. You couldn’t really say we were involved.”
    “Then why bring him up?” Michael asked.
    “I didn’t bring him up; I brought up his mother. His mother was the one I loved. I just wish now I’d kept in touch with her.”
    Michael looked at Pauline a moment longer, and then he shook his head and reached again for the coleslaw.
    Rodney Dimity! He’d had freckles and a button nose, and he used to blush like a girl any time she spoke to him. She supposed that had been his charm: he was safe. Not too manly or bold. They had never even so much as held hands; just exchanged a few secretive smiles that turned Rodney’s face rosy red. Then she had outgrown him and moved on to other boys. Richard Brand, the first boy she kissed. Darryl Mace, who gave her his gigantic class ring to wear on a key chain beneath her blouse so that her parents wouldn’t notice. Her parents had thought Darryl was too old for her. (He was eighteen to her fifteen.) Pauline had not been allowed to go alone with a boy to the movies yet, even, but already that warm, heavy ring was nestled between her breasts. Oh, she’d long ago left Rodney Dimity behind!
    In high school it seemed that each boy she fell for had been more challenging, more daunting than the one before. She would start out assuming that surely this new boy would never give her a glance, but then he did and they would date for a time until gradually she would grow restless, and somebody else would catch her eye, someone supposedly unattainable, but even so . . . Now when she reviewed her past it was like gazing down a long flight of stairs. Sweet, nebulous Rodney stood at the bottom, and Roy Cannon—senior class president, football captain, most-sought-after boy in her school—stood at the top, his neck so big and muscular that it was almost indistinguishable from his mighty shoulders. Roy had gone into his uncle’s used-car business after graduation, but by then Pauline’s enthusiasm was fading. She began to notice how loud his voice was; in a suit instead of a football uniform, his neck seemed grotesquely misshapen. When she broke up with him, though, she had no one new on the horizon—a first. (She was out of school herself by that time, and working in her father’s office, where meeting boys was more difficult.) She had no one to say goodbye to when the war began, and although some might say that was fortunate, she didn’t feel fortunate. In that first, feverish rush after Pearl Harbor she saw couples embracing everywhere she looked, boys standing outside recruitment offices with girls clinging proudly, bravely to their arms, but Pauline was all by herself.
    Except for Michael.
    Was that the whole explanation? That she had just wanted a boy of her own to send off to