Common Knowledge : Part 1

The Amateur Marriage: A Novel
by Anne Tyler

From the inimitable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage - and its consequences, spanning three generations.

They seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.

Chapter 1

Anyone in the neighborhood could tell you how Michael and Pauline first met.

It happened on a Monday afternoon early in December of 1941. St. Cassian was its usual poky self that day - a street of narrow East Baltimore row houses, carefully kept little homes intermingled with shops no bigger than small parlors. The Golka twins, identically kerchiefed, compared cake rouges through the window of Sweda's Drugs. Mrs. Pozniak stepped out of the hardware store with a tiny brown paper bag that jingled. Mr. Kostka's Model-B Ford puttered past, followed by a stranger's sleekly swishing Chrysler Airstream and then by Ernie Moskowicz on the butcher's battered delivery bike.

In Anton's Grocery - a dim, cram-packed cubbyhole with an L-shaped wooden counter and shelves that reached the low ceiling - Michael's mother wrapped two tins of peas for Mrs. Brunek. She tied them up tightly and handed them over without a smile, without a "Come back soon" or a "Nice to see you." (Mrs. Anton had had a hard life.) One of Mrs. Brunek's boys - Carl? Paul? Peter? they all looked so much alike - pressed his nose to the glass of the penny-candy display. A floorboard creaked near the cereals, but that was just the bones of the elderly building settling deeper into the ground.

Michael was shelving Woodbury's soap bars behind the longer, left-hand section of the counter. He was twenty at the time, a tall young man in ill-fitting clothes, his hair very black and cut too short, his face a shade too thin, with that dark kind of whiskers that always showed no matter how often he shaved. He was stacking the soap in a pyramid, a base of five topped by four, topped by three . . . although his mother had announced, more than once, that she preferred a more compact, less creative arrangement.

Then, tinkle, tinkle! and wham! and what seemed at first glance a torrent of young women exploded through the door. They brought a gust of cold air with them and the smell of auto exhaust. "Help us!" Wanda Bryk shrilled. Her best friend, Katie Vilna, had her arm around an unfamiliar girl in a red coat, and another girl pressed a handkerchief to the red-coated girl's right temple. "She's been hurt! She needs first aid!" Wanda cried.

Michael stopped his shelving. Mrs. Brunek clapped a hand to her cheek, and Carl or Paul or Peter drew in a whistle of a breath. But Mrs. Anton did not so much as blink. "Why bring her here?" she asked. "Take her to the drugstore."

"The drugstore's closed," Katie told her.

"Closed?"

"It says so on the door. Mr. Sweda's joined the Coast Guard."

"He's done what?"

The girl in the red coat was very pretty, despite the trickle of blood running past one ear. She was taller than the two neighborhood girls but slender, more slightly built, with a leafy cap of dark-blond hair and an upper lip that rose in two little points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen. Michael came out from behind the counter to take a closer look at her. "What happened?" he asked her - only her, gazing at her intently.

"Get her a Band-Aid! Get iodine!" Wanda Bryk commanded. She had gone through grade school with Michael. She seemed to feel she could boss him around.

The girl said, "I jumped off a streetcar."

Her voice was low and husky, a shock after Wanda's thin vio- lin notes. Her eyes were the purple-blue color of pansies. Michael swallowed.

"A parade's begun on Dubrowski Street," Katie was telling the others. "All six of the Szapp boys are enlisting, haven't you heard? And a couple of their friends besides. They've got this banner - 'Watch out, Japs! Here come the Szapps!' - and everyone's seeing them off. They've gathered such a crowd that the traffic can't hardly get through. So Pauline here - she was heading home from work; places are closing early - what does she do? Jumps off a speeding streetcar to join in."

The streetcar couldn't have been speeding all that fast, if traffic was clogged, but nobody pointed that out. Mrs. Brunek gave a sympathetic murmur. Carl or Paul or Peter said, "Can I go, Mama? Can I? Can I go watch the parade?"

"I just thought we should try and support our boys," Pauline told Michael.

He swallowed again. He said, "Well, of course."

"You're not going to help our boys any knocking yourself silly," the girl with the handkerchief said. From her tolerant tone, you could see that she and Pauline were friends, although she was less attractive - a brown-haired girl with a calm expression and eyebrows so long and level that she seemed lacking in emotion.

"We think she hit her head against a lamppost," Wanda said, "but nobody could be sure in all the fuss. She landed in our laps, just about, with Anna here a ways behind her. I said, 'Jeepers! Are you okay?' Well, somebody had to do something; we couldn't just let her bleed to death. Don't you people have Band-Aids?"

"This place is not a pharmacy," Mrs. Anton said. And then, pursuing an obvious connection,

"Whatever got into Nick Sweda? He must be thirty-five if he's a day!" Michael, meanwhile, had turned away from Pauline to join his mother behind the counter - the shorter, end section of the counter where the cash register stood. He bent down, briefly disappeared, and emerged with a cigar box. "Bandages," he explained.

Not Band-Aids, but old-fashioned cotton batting rolled in dark-blue tissue the exact shade of Pauline's eyes, and a spool of white adhesive tape, and an oxblood-colored bottle of iodine. Wanda stepped forward to take them; but no, Michael unrolled the cotton himself and tore a wad from one corner. He soaked the wad with iodine and came back to stand in front of Pauline. "Let me see," he said.

Copyright © 2004 by Anne Tyler.

About the Author

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is her 17th novel. Her 11th, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. A member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she lives in Baltimore, Maryland.