Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,32
had a hard childhood,” Micah said. “My childhood was fine. Mom and Dad were great. I’m just saying, when you grow up in that kind of chaos you vow to do things differently once you’re on your own.”
“Then how about me?” Ada asked him.
“You?”
She was spooning out clumps of dessert and plopping them on the plates. She paused to lick whipped cream off her thumb before she said, “I grew up in chaos too, didn’t I? Suze and the twins grew up in chaos. None of us are fussbudgets.”
“No indeedy,” Micah said. (The petals of the dead chrysanthemums were scattered across the sideboard. A comic book—soaking wet, for some reason—lay on the floor near the kitchen doorway.)
“Some kids are raised in a mess,” Ada said, “and they say, ‘When I’m on my own, I’ll be neater than God.’ Others are raised in a mess and they say, ‘Life is a mess, looks like, and that’s just the way it is.’ It’s got nothing to do with their upbringing.”
“It’s genes,” Liz said. “You remember how Grandpa Mortimer was.”
“Oh, yes,” Norma said shaking her head.
“Micah never knew him,” Liz told Lily, “but he got his genes anyhow. He was the only one of us who did. Everything was just so at Grandpa’s! Everything in its place! His sock drawer looked like a box of bonbons, each pair rolled and standing on end according to his instructions. Newspaper read in the proper sequence, first section first and second section next, folded back knife-sharp when he was done. Lord forbid someone should fiddle with the paper before him! He was a sign painter by profession, and all of his paints and his India inks were lined up by color in alphabetical order. The Bs I remember especially, because there were so many of them. Beige, black, blue, brown…I forget what came next.”
“Burgundy, maybe?” Norma suggested.
“What’s so strange about that?” Micah asked. “How else would you do it?”
“I would trust my own common sense,” Liz said. “I’d say, ‘Blue, hmm—where’s my blue? I remember I used it last when I did that For Rent sign yesterday.’?”
Micah could just imagine what Liz’s workbench would look like—the random cans and bottles intermingled with paint-stiffened brushes, old coffee mugs, a cable bill and a dog leash and a half-eaten bagel.
“The point I’m trying to make,” Ada said, “is it’s not so much about whether a person is messy or neat. It’s whether they’re accepting or they’re not accepting of the way things happen to be. What we accepting ones know to say is, ‘It is what it is, in the end.’?”
“Well, I call that pretty discouraging,” Micah said. “What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?”
Ada shrugged and handed a child a plate of dessert. “You got me there,” she said.
* * *
—
It was the custom for the men to clean up after family dinners. Micah was in charge of loading the dishwasher, because he had a system. Phil scraped down the grill, and Dave and Grant brought in the last of the things from the dining room. Kegger merely hung about getting underfoot. In theory, the sons and the sons-in-law were supposed to pitch in too, but this caused such a traffic jam that they soon wandered out to the backyard, where a Wiffle-ball game was in progress.
Even after the men had finished, though, the kitchen failed to reach what Micah considered a satisfactory state. The counters were still strewn with Lego blocks and Magic Markers and pocketbooks, and for some reason the oven door refused to close.
Well, okay: he would just try to be accepting.
In the living room he found the women sprawled about in exhausted attitudes, watching a few toddlers build a racetrack on the rug. A daughter-in-law lay asleep in the recliner, but the baby in her lap was wide awake, chewing a rubber pretzel she was clutching in both hands. Micah tried twiddling his fingers at her enticingly. The baby sent him a severe look and went on chewing.
“Have a seat,” Ada told