The Tin Can Tree (28 page)

“No, really, I’m all right,” said Simon. “Look, they’re letting me have wine. They put ice cubes in it to make it watery but I drink it fast before the ice can melt.”

“That’s nice,” Joan said vaguely. She kept looking around at the others. Ansel leaned toward Joan with his own jelly glass of wine and said, “
Drink
up,” and thrust it at her, and then lay down again. “Ansel had to find his own supper tonight,” Simon told her. “He had one slice of garlic bologna, all dried out. James is going to cook him a steak tomorrow to make up for it.”

Joan took a long swallow of cooking wine and looked over at James. He was swiveling his eyes toward the silhouette while he kept his profile straight ahead, so that he seemed cross-eyed. When he felt Joan looking at him he smiled and called something to her that she couldn’t hear, and then Miss Faye said, “When you talk your nose moves up and down,” and erased the line she had drawn for his nose and left a smudge there. Mr. Pike laughed. He clanged when he laughed; it puzzled Joan for a minute, and then she examined him more closely and found in his lap the elephant bell from Mrs. Pike’s mantelpiece. “Why has he got that bell?” she asked Simon.

Simon shrugged, and Ansel answered for him. “He used it while hunting for Simon,” he called. “Weird thing, ain’t it? Such a funny shape it has. Everything Indians do is backwards, seems to me—”

“Fifteen!” Mrs. Pike said.

“
India
Indians, of course,” said Ansel. “Not American. Hey, James.”

Miss Faye’s pencil had just hit the bottom of James’s neck. She finished off with that same little bump at the base of it that sculptors put on marble busts, and then James stretched and turned toward Ansel.

“What,” he said.

“Funny feeling in my feet, James.”

James sighed and rose to go over to the couch. “Well, thank you, Miss Faye,” he called over his shoulder.

“No trouble at all. Joan, dear, it’s your turn.”

“How about Simon?” asked Joan.

“They did me first,” Simon told her. “I’m the guest of honor.”

“Oh.” She stood up and went over to the Potters, still carrying her glass of wine. “My hair’s not combed,” she told them.

“That’s all right, we’ll just smooth over that part on the paper. Will you have a seat?”

They sat her down firmly, both of them pressing on her shoulders. The lamp glared at her so brightly that it made a circular world that she sat in alone, facing Miss Lucy’s steadily breathing bosom while Miss Faye, strange without gloves, skimmed the pencil around a suddenly too-big shadow of Joan. Outside the circle was the noise, and the beating music and the dark, faceless figures of the others. Their conversation seemed to be blurring together now.

“I had a cousin once who did
group
silhouettes,” said Miss Faye. “I don’t know how. It’s a talent I never had—he could make everyone be doing something so like themselves, even in a silhouette of twenty people you could name each person present.”

“That was Howard,” Miss Lucy said.

“Howard Potter Laskin. I remember him well. If he was only here tonight, why, we could put him right to work. I wish I knew how he did it.”

“Where is he now?” Miss Lucy asked.

“I don’t know.”

Joan looked at her shadow, staring almost sideways the way James had done. “There is a whole
gallery
of silhouettes in this house,” she said suddenly.

“Quiet, dear, you’ve moved.”

“Didn’t I have this blouse on the last time? There was that same sticking-up frill around my neck.”

“Yes,” said Miss Faye. She sighed and her pencil moved briefly outside the shadow of the frill. “Simon had the same shirt, too,” she said.

“How do you remember?”

“The collar’s worn out. Little threads poking up.”

Joan looked over at Simon; he nodded and held up the corner of his collar. “This is the shirt I ran away in,” he called.

“Didn’t you get dressed up to go?”

“You didn’t do the laundry yet.”

“Oh,” said Joan, and she turned back to fit her head into the silhouette. Miss Faye started on the back of her hair, skimming past the shadows of stray wisps the way she had promised.

“The mornings after parties,” she said, “Miss Lucy and I cut these out and mount them. Don’t we, Lucy? We talk over the parties as we cut.”

“I think we should take a picture,” said Simon.

“A what?”

“A picture. A photograph. With a camera.” He took a swallow of wine.

“Sixteen,” said his mother, still counting.

“I
know
. James could take it when you’re done with
Joan there. Me in my shirt that I ran away in. Everybody else standing around.”

“Cameras are all very well,” Miss Faye said. “But who can’t press a button? If Howard Potter Laskin was here—”

“Howard did
everything
well,” said Miss Lucy.

“I could take you and Miss Lucy drawing silhouettes,” James called. He looked up from rubbing Ansel’s feet. “Could Howard Potter Laskin do that?”

“Well, now—” Miss Faye said. She lowered her pencil and frowned into space a minute. “A silhouette of a silhouette? I don’t know. But Howard could—”

“I’ll get my camera, then,” said James. He left Ansel’s couch and crossed toward the darkroom, stepping carefully through the other people. But the minute he was gone, Miss Faye finished Joan’s silhouette with two quick strokes, ending in a point on top of her head that wasn’t really there.

“You weren’t
supposed
to finish,” Joan said. “How will he have you doing a silhouette if there’s no more left to do?”

“Oh, now,” said Miss Lucy. “People don’t
get
photographed making silhouettes. We’ll just sit down, I think—maybe on Ansel’s couch, if he doesn’t object.”

They began gathering up their pencils and paper. All over the room, people were getting ready for that camera. Simon had buttoned the top button of his shirt, so that he looked as if he would choke, and Ansel was sitting ramrod-straight with his numb feet on the coffee table in front of him. By the time James returned the whole room seemed tense and silent. Even the radio had been turned off. James said, “I don’t hardly recognize you all,” and everyone laughed a little and then
got quiet again. “You’re going to have to bunch up now,” he said.

They moved closer in, heading toward Ansel who for once allowed someone else to sit on the couch. “Simon can sit on the floor,” said James. “That would help. Miss Faye, can you move your silhouettes in?”

“Oh, I don’t think—” said Miss Faye, but James cut her off as if he already knew what she would say.

“Sure you can,” he said. “Everyone gets photographed making silhouettes these days.” And though Miss Faye smiled, to show she didn’t believe him, she brought one of her silhouettes over and set it on the back of the couch against the wall. “That’s better,” he said. He was carrying his little box camera, and he held it in front of his stomach now and squinted into the view-finder. “Almost,” he said. “Joan, where are you? All I get is your foot.”

Joan moved over, squeezing in against Simon on the floor. “Ouch,” said Simon. “James, are you going to get in the picture?”

“Not while I’m taking it I’m not,” said James.

“You should,” Miss Lucy said. “You’re the one that went and got him.”

“No. I hate being photographed.”

“Then what’s the use?” Simon said. He looked around at the others. “
James
made that special trip—”

“I’ll take it,” said Joan. She stood up. “You show me how to aim it, James.”

“How to—”

“No, Joan should be in it too,” Simon said.

But Mr. Pike came to life suddenly and reached down to touch Simon’s shoulder. “Can’t have everything, boy,” he said. “Come on and get in the picture, James.
Joan
didn’t go nowhere; she don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t,” Joan told James. “Give it here.”

“Well, all right.”

He put it in her hands and then showed her the button. “This is what you press,” he told her. “It’s not all that hard.”

He went over to sit on the arm of the sofa, next to Ansel, and now even James looked self-conscious. When Joan peered at them through the view-finder she saw all of their faces made clear and tiny, with their smiles stretched tight and each person’s hand clamped white around a glass of wine. Ansel’s feet were bigger than anyone. He still had them propped up, and when Joan raised her head to glare at them he ducked a glance at her and said, “They hurt.”

“They’re in the way,” Joan told him.

“They hurt.”

“If you’d get the right size
shoes—
” said James.

Mr. Pike bent forward to stare at Ansel’s feet; his elephant bell clanged again and Ansel said suddenly, breaking in on what James was saying, “I had a
cousin
engaged to a India Indian. I ever mention that?”

“No,” said Joan. “Your feet, please, Ansel.” She lowered her head and stared into the finder again, but Ansel showed no sign of moving his feet.

“I’d nearly forgotten about it,” he said. “This particular Indian used to sing a lot. All the time long songs, India Indian songs, without no tune. He’d finish and we’d clap and say, ‘Well, wasn’t that—’ when oops, there he’d go, on to the next line. Got so we were
afraid
to clap. On and on he’d go, on and on.”

“Are you
sure
we shouldn’t just sit in a chair?” asked Miss Lucy.

“Wednesday came and went,” James said. “When will you remember your shots?”

In the finder of the camera Joan could see them moving, each person making his own set of motions. But the glass of the finder seemed to hold them there, like figures in a snowflurry paperweight who would still be in their set positions when the snow settled down again. She thought whole years could pass, they could be born and die, they could leave and return, they could marry or live out their separate lives alone, and nothing in this finder would change. They were going to stay this way, she and all the rest of them, not because of anyone else but because it was what they had chosen, what they would keep a strong tight hold of. James bent over Ansel; Mrs. Pike touched the top of Simon’s head, and Mr. Pike sat smiling awkwardly into space. “It starts near the arches,” said Ansel, “right about here …”

“Be still,” said Joan.

She kept her head down and stared at the camera, smiling as if it were she herself being photographed. The others smiled back, each person motionless, each clutching separately his glass of wine.

A Reader’s Guide

ANNE TYLER

A C
ONVERSATION WITH
A
NNE
T
YLER

Q:
The Tin Can Tree
is one of your earliest novels, written almost forty years ago. Has your opinion of the novel and the characters within it changed at all since you wrote it? In what ways?

Anne Tyler:
When I wrote that novel, I was doing the best job I could do at the time. I must have sent it out feeling that it was worth sending. But now I think it’s very young and very inept.

Q:
How would you define your own writing style? How has it changed since you wrote
The Tin Can Tree?
How does this novel compare to some of your others stylistically?

AT:
I have been aiming all these years for a style that is transparent—that lets readers lead the lives I’m describing without thinking about who’s describing them. But I was a long way from that goal in
The Tin Can Tree
. Also, it seems to me that I didn’t properly trust my readers’ intelligence in those days. I overexplained.

Q:
When you sit down to write a novel, do you always go through the same process? Has this process changed significantly in the last forty years? How?

AT:
That part is very much the same. I fall in love, you might say. I become riveted on a character, a situation, or a what-if and I long to know every detail of it.

Q:
How long do you typically spend between novels? How do you know when you are ready to begin writing again? Do you need some time to say good-bye to the characters of your last book before you can begin creating new ones for the next?

AT:
When I finish a novel, I generally spend the next year or so closet-cleaning and drawer-sorting and, oh, just ordinary living, as opposed to writing. Then gradually I start feeling that closets are perhaps not the be-all and end-all that I had imagined. But
The Tin Can Tree
was a different proposition. I had just had my first novel,
If Morning Ever Comes
, accepted for publication when my agent advised me to begin my next one, because he felt that writers often develop a sort of mental block with their second novels. So I started
The Tin Can Tree
immediately. I think I should have given myself more time to “refill.”

Q:
What planted the seeds of
The Tin Can Tree?
Are the characters based on any real-world counterparts, or are they entirely products of your imagination?