Back When We Were Grownups Page 10

  Biddy’s eyes grew pink, and she turned and flounced out of the kitchen. A moment later, they heard the front door slam. All NoNo said was, “Hm-hm-hm!”—a little three-note humming sound—as she poured herself another cup of coffee.

  Oh, Rebecca didn’t look forward to this wedding in the least.

  And the worst of it, from her own point of view, was that Tina was attending. NoNo’s mother, Joe’s ex-wife, all the way from England, where she lived now. Because she had so far to come, she arrived three days ahead of time. A whole caravan of cars went to meet her at the airport—Biddy and Troy, Patch and Jeep, NoNo and Barry, and every available child—but even so, several pieces of her luggage had to ride back in people’s laps. She traveled like a movie star, with one suitcase devoted to shoes and another to cosmetics. And she didn’t carry a thing herself but sailed ahead of her struggling bearers, bestowing a smile to her right and her left as she entered the house. “Rachel, dear!” she cried. Rebecca said, “Rebecca,” and let herself be engulfed in a perfumed embrace. “What a sweet outfit!” Tina told her. Rebecca had given some thought to her outfit—a plain white blouse that she had gone so far as to iron and a conservative, non-Bag-Lady, navy A-line skirt—but now she saw that what she most resembled was an overweight flight attendant. Tina, on the other hand, looked gorgeous. She was tall and slim, with masses of auburn hair piled on top of her head, and all her features were stunningly exaggerated: large, long-lashed eyes, pillowy red lips, confident prow of a nose. Her blurry, clinging dress could have gone straight to the wedding, but Rebecca knew, from earlier occasions, that Tina’s attire at the wedding would outshine the bride’s. It was obvious that she was nearly sixty, but she made sixty seem sophisticated and sexy.

  Rebecca sank into a depression, all at once. She folded her arms across her stomach and watched bleakly as Tina dove into her luggage, pulling forth lavish presents for every member of the family. (Her second husband—ex-husband, now—was a very wealthy man.) French colognes, Irish crystal, a genuine badger shaving brush for Poppy, a regiment of lead soldiers for her new grandson . . . and for Rebecca, an apron. “Thanks,” Rebecca said tonelessly, but her voice was lost among the others.

  It had occurred to her, often, that the way to win your family’s worshipful devotion was to abandon them. Look at how Tina’s daughters clustered around her! The men acted bashful and smitten—especially Barry, who was meeting her for the first time—and the children were dumbstruck. Even Min Foo, no relation at all, wore a look of breathless expectancy when she arrived. “Minerva, darling!” Tina cried, sweeping her into her arms, and then she gave her a pair of carved ivory chopsticks for her chignon. Tina never used nicknames; it was always Minerva, Bridget, Patricia, Elinor with her. Rebecca supposed that was significant. Distance was the key, here: the distant, alluring mystery woman whose edges had not been worn dull by the constant minor abrasions of daily contact.

  “Well,” Rebecca said, “I guess I’ll go see to dinner.”

  Nobody offered to help.

  In the kitchen, Alice Farmer was slicing tomatoes. Her angular, blue-black face was generally unreadable, but there was no mistaking the sardonic arch of her eyebrows. “Come to hide out, have you,” she said. (She’d been working here long enough to have witnessed several of Tina’s visits.)

  “I’ve a good mind to eat at a Burger King,” Rebecca told her. “Let them get their own damn dinner.”

  Alice Farmer gave a whistling hiss of a laugh and handed her a bag of corn to shuck.

  Rebecca wondered how Joe would have behaved in this situation. She had never had the chance to observe him and Tina together. (The two women had first met at his funeral—probably a bizarre encounter, although Rebecca had been too numb with grief to notice.) Of course she had quizzed him about Tina while they were courting. “I suppose she’s very attractive,” she had ventured, and Joe had said, “Sure, if that’s the type you go for.”

  “And she must have a beautiful voice.”

  “Tina? She’s got a crow’s voice.”

  “But if she’s a nightclub singer . . .”

  “So-called singer. Quote-unquote singer.”

  She had felt a wave of relief that must have been visible, for Joe had smiled at her and said, “Have you been fretting your head about her?”

  “You did choose to marry her,” she reminded him.

  “She did happen to be pregnant, Beck.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Do you think we’d have married if she weren’t? Either one of us? We were miserable together. At the end of that third pregnancy, she was counting the days till she delivered so she could leave.”

  But now Rebecca heard the girls’ laughter clear back here in the kitchen—louder than usual, and merrier. You would think they’d had the world’s most doting mother.

  She unraveled the tassels from an ear of corn and let herself return to her true real life, where she and Will had one child between them, one biological child. A boy, let’s say. (Girls were so complex.) A boy like the one on the train. They would have named him something dignified: Ethan, or Tristram. Something that couldn’t easily be shortened. He would be a solemn type even when he was very young—a watchful, focused baby, content to sit for long periods of time studying his surroundings. A quiet toddler. An inquisitive little boy. The kind who might take a clock apart out of scientific curiosity. “Tristram! What have you done?” she would ask, coming upon a heap of sprocketed innards. But she would feel secretly proud of him.

  She would buy him—she and Will would buy him—books about dinosaurs, and Atlantis, and the boyhood of Thomas Edison. Maybe they would pick up an old music box at a thrift shop, and later a toaster or radio, something broken that he could tinker with and eventually get to working, much to everyone’s amazement.

  He would probably have a little trouble making friends. Oh, she might as well face up to the fact! Nobody was perfect. His grade-school teachers would send home reports: A’s on his academic subjects but a C or D in phys ed, and a note to the effect that he lacked team spirit. That he worked poorly on group projects. That he experienced some minor difficulty in getting along with his peers.

  She would go in for a conference and nod and look concerned, and then try not to show her pleasure when the teacher finished up by saying, “Apart from that, of course, your son is a real joy. None of my other students is as bright or creative as Tristram.”

  “Yes, well, he’s always been very . . .” she would murmur. With her eyes modestly lowered.

  In high school his sole companion would be a boy obsessed with computers. The two would spend whole weekends shut up in Tristram’s room, constructing something incomprehensible out of electrical wire and a disemboweled television set. She would knock and offer cookies; Tristram would say, “Huh? Oh. Thanks.” Then she would stand in his doorway a while breathing in the smells of machine oil and sweaty sneakers. It wouldn’t bother her a bit that he paid her no attention. She knew he had reached the stage where he had to start pulling away from her.

  She knew that underneath, he would always love her.

  “Hand me them corn ears, will you?” Alice Farmer said. “Miz Davitch? Pot’s on the boil. Could you please hand me the corn?”

  Rebecca merely blinked at her.

  * * *

  There were so many people at dinner that the children had to eat separately. This caused several different arguments, because some of the children—the ones in their teens—felt they were old enough to eat with the grownups. And it didn’t help a bit that Tina kept saying, “Of course you’re old enough! Come sit next to me.” Rebecca had to step in, finally. “Tina,” she said, “this table seats twelve, and that’s how many adults we have. I’m putting all seven of the children in the kitchen.”

  Tina shrugged and gave the teenagers a pouchy-lipped look of commiseration. Then she patted the chair to her right and said, “Oh, well, Barry, you sit next to me, then. And Hakim on my other side.” (The two best-looking men in the room
, wouldn’t you know.) “Seven grandchildren!” she told Rebecca. “You and I could practically start a baseball team!”

  Half of Rebecca felt flattered; there was a certain confiding, intimate quality to Tina that she always found seductive. But the other half wanted to point out that Tina had no right at all to claim Min Foo’s two children. She gave her a bland smile and then deliberately seated herself between her own favorites, Troy and Zeb, although her usual spot was next to Poppy. Poppy was down near the end, repeatedly asking if someone would please turn off the lights in the parlor. Nobody volunteered, though. They were all vying for Tina’s attention, the girls addressing her as “Mother” more often than was needed, forming their lips around the word in a self-conscious and unskilled manner.

  It was pathetic to recollect that once, when Rebecca was first married, she had suggested to the girls that they call her “Mom.” “But you’re not our mom,” they had said. “That would be a lie.” Oh, children were such sticklers for the absolute, literal truth. (The other day, introducing Peter to the plumber, Rebecca had said, “Meet my future stepdaughter’s stepson; I mean my stepdaughter’s future stepson. My stepgrandson-to-be, I mean.” Mr. Burdick’s eyes had widened. No doubt he’d thought her unwelcoming, not to simply call the boy her grandson. But Rebecca knew from experience that Peter might all too well have contradicted her outright and made her look like a fraud.)

  Alice Farmer sailed in, stately and important, holding a platter of crab cakes high above her head. “Why, Alice,” Tina said. “Are you still with us.” This gave Rebecca a twist of wicked satisfaction, because Alice Farmer hated being addressed by anything but her whole name. It was one of her quirks. Alice Farmer set the platter in front of Rebecca and sent Tina a long, flat stare beneath half-shuttered lids before she left the room.

  “If I were Tina, I’d hire myself a taster before the next course,” Zeb murmured out of the side of his mouth. But Tina had blithely moved on, by now, to the subject of the wedding. She was asking Barry how he and NoNo had met, where he had proposed, what kind of ceremony they planned. Her questions were delivered with that falling intonation that the English use—“Won’t it be dreadfully hot in the garden”—and at some stage during her years abroad she seemed to have lost the knack of pronouncing her r’s. “God-den,” was what she said. Rebecca resolved to stop being so critical. “Could I offer you a crab cake,” she asked Troy, but unfortunately the question came out with that same downward note at the end. Troy gave a sputter of a laugh. Rebecca plopped a crab cake onto his plate, pointedly avoiding his eyes.

  “We’ve finally found a minister,” Barry was telling Tina. “NoNo and I were in a restaurant the other night, talking about who we could get to marry us, and our waitress said, ‘Why, I could do that.’ Turns out she has some kind of certificate she sent away for through the mail. Perfectly legal, she says. A really nice lady. Says she’ll do it for free.”

  This was news to Rebecca. All she’d heard was that the officiator would be a woman. She had pictured someone magisterial, wearing a flowing black robe like Sandra What’s-It on the Supreme Court bench. Now a whole new image popped up: a person in a dingy pink nylon uniform and a hairnet.

  “Well, and why not,” Tina said cheerfully. “It’s all a big charade, anyhow. Isn’t it,” she asked Hakim. He gave her a dazzled smile. “Just a primitive tribal ritual,” she went on, “meant to make us forget we’re merely propagating the species. When I think what I could have accomplished if I hadn’t bothered with marriage! It’s enough to make me weep.”

  “What,” Zeb said politely.

  “Pardon?”

  “What could you have accomplished?”

  “Well, you’ll have to ask my voice teacher that. She was devastated when I married Joe. Absolutely devastated. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you are throwing away a God-given talent, purely to enter an institution invented by males for their own benefit.’ And she was right; I know that now. Oh,” she said, turning a radiant smile on Hakim, “women may find marriage useful during that little childbearing phase. But then as the years go by, they need their husbands less and less while their husbands need them more and more. Men expect all that listening and marveling and yes-darling-aren’t-you-amazing, those balanced meals and clean sheets and waxed floors, and then the blood-pressure monitoring and the low-sodium diet, and the hand-holding when they retire and can’t think what to do with themselves. And the wives, meanwhile, start longing to get free. They start running off to their ladies’ luncheons and their women’s book-club meetings and their girls-only wilderness trips.”

  “Great, Tina,” Zeb said. “You certainly know the right thing to say to a bridal couple.”

  The others laughed—some a bit uncertainly, Rebecca thought. But Tina lifted her chin and told him, “I don’t notice you’ve been in any rush to marry.”

  “No, I guess I haven’t,” he said. “I’m still waiting for Rebecca.”

  Rebecca sent him a grateful smile, but Tina did not appear to have heard. “Seriously, though,” she told the others. “You have to admit that love is a waste. It’s expensive, it’s inconvenient, it’s time-consuming, it’s messy . . .”

  They laughed again, more easily now. They must have decided she was joking. That Tina: such a card.

  But Rebecca didn’t think she was joking. Or not entirely. She suspected Tina was expressing exactly what she felt.

  The funny thing was that she felt that way herself, at certain moments. She gazed around her at this tangle of relatives and in-laws, the children tumbling in from the kitchen to complain about some injustice, Poppy announcing his birthday party for the thousandth time, Peter slouching wretchedly on the fringes of the group . . .

  And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren’t for love.

  * * *

  Phone photographer, she reminded herself before she went to sleep. Phone NoNo to ask what music she wants. Pick up Poppy’s suit from the cleaner.

  She knew she should switch on the lamp and make a list, but she was too tired. Instead, she tried to envision the list on the ceiling above her bed—a mnemonic device that never really worked. Ask Dixon if he could drive Alice Farmer home after the wedding, she added. She slid her left foot to a cooler spot on the sheet. Find out whether Barry . . .

  Then she lost track of her thoughts and lay staring into the dark.

  It made her might-have-been existence more real to imagine also the negatives. Will, for instance, would probably have been a workaholic. He was just the type to stay late at the lab and converse in monosyllables when his mind was on his research. There she’d be, serving him a gourmet dinner, wearing something enticing, brushing the back of his neck with her fingers as she poured his wine, and he would say, “You know? I think I’ve figured out where I went wrong in that last experiment.”

  As for Tristram: he would never quite outgrow his social ineptness. She and Will would always worry about him a little. Although professionally he would be very successful, doing something scientific that she couldn’t pretend to understand, she didn’t suppose he would marry till relatively late. He tended to develop inappropriate crushes on shallow, bubbly blondes who didn’t return his interest. (You had to be able to see beyond his earnest, shy, fumbling manner.) Like his father, he would seem a bit removed from his own culture.

  Oh, it wasn’t always easy, Rebecca would tell her friends.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe you’re going to let Poppy give a toast at the wedding,” Tina said. “He’s not in earshot, is he.”

  “No, he’s up in his room,” Rebecca told her. “He had breakfast hours ago.”

  She was hoping to make a point—it was after 9 a.m.—but Tina let it pass right over her head. “The man’s a total loss!” she said. “He seems to have about one-sixteenth of his mind left, every cell of it devoted to the savoring of sweets.”

  Rebecca had never heard anyone use the word savoring in casual conversation. She wondered if Tin
a would spell it in the British way, with an our. She spent so long considering this—standing at the kitchen stove, watching a pat of butter melt and begin to sizzle—that Tina gave a cluck of impatience and reached past her for the egg carton. “My God, it’s some kind of cruel joke,” she said when she had lifted the lid. She was looking down at a double row of eggshells. Rebecca always put the shells back in the carton when she was cooking. In fact, she’d assumed that everyone did. This was what happened when people came to stay: they forced you to view your life from outside, to realize that there was, come to think of it, something faintly mocking about a carton full of empty shells. But two eggs remained intact, and she plucked those out and rapped them against the rim of the skillet.

  “As for that birthday party,” Tina said, “I don’t know how you can even consider it! He’d forget you’d thrown it, anyway, half a minute later. And think of the conversation: round and round, the same subjects over and over. All his guests would go mad.”

  Rebecca, too, suspected that Poppy might not remember the party afterward. Her hard work would come to nothing. But she said, “That’s okay; we’ll remind him.”

  “Simpler just not to do it and tell him you had.”

  “Also,” Rebecca said, dreamily stirring the eggs, “it can be kind of interesting when he repeats himself. New details come out, different slants on the old stories. Sometimes I end up learning something.”

  “For what that’s worth,” Tina said. “He always was a bit of a bore, even when Aunt Joyce was alive; but now, good God! I guess she covered up for him more than we imagined.”

  “Well, who knows? Maybe we’d say the same thing in reverse if he’d been the one who died,” Rebecca said. “Maybe the two of them together made a unit that worked, and whichever one of them went first would have left the other, oh, just . . . lopsided and lame.”

  There was a short silence, during which Rebecca turned off the burner and carried the skillet over to the table. She dished the eggs onto Tina’s plate, set the skillet in the sink, and asked, “Coffee? Tea?”