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1.
Common Knowledge

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...

 

"An ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life."

 

"Tyler ranges over 60 years of American experience... from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the anniversary of that day in 2001...as she tracks one couple's domestic disturbances...[Her] writing is beautifully accurate, more often than not with a glinting vein of humor."

 

"She evokes the entire sweep of [a marriage] with uncommon delicacy & dignity... gives us the feeling of being inside Michael and Pauline Anton's marriage."

 

"She traces the stormy union of two people who love but can't stand each other."

 

"This 'wickedly good' author has come to represent the best of today's American literature... She is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday
...Her characters are at once infuriating and endearing, conservative yet quietly eccentric."

 

"Her command of what will move a story forward & engross a reader is faultless."

 

"She expertly explores the perils of marriage... Wise & observant...She has the uncanny ability to expose the most confusing contradictions of love."

 

"In the fervor of WWII, Michael and Pauline rush head-long into marriage, then live in a constant state of turmoil ...We watch safely from a distance like a busybody neighbor hiding behind the curtains, judgmental yet fascinated."