Back When We Were Grownups Page 11

  Only then, turning from the sink, did she notice how intently Tina was studying her. “What,” she said.

  Tina said, “Oh, nothing.” She settled at the table, scooping her long skirt beneath her. (Like someone in an old movie, she wore a full-length satin dressing gown to breakfast.) “Coffee, please,” she said. Then she said, “You must have felt sort of lopsided yourself, all these years.”

  “Well,” Rebecca said.

  “You don’t have any, shall we say, man friend, I suppose.”

  “Oh, no,” Rebecca said. She poured a cup of coffee and set it in front of Tina.

  “Quite right: why would you want one,” Tina told her. “Such a nuisance, they are.”

  This struck Rebecca as unexpectedly kind. She sat down opposite Tina and said, “It isn’t that, exactly—”

  “And after baby-sitting Joe Davitch!” Tina said. “No wonder you need a rest. God, the Davitches in general: a bunch of mopers. They could really weigh a person down.”

  “Oh, well, I wouldn’t—”

  “Any time I think of his mother, I picture her on the verge of tears. You know how her chin would pock up. How her lower lip would quiver. It’s ironic that her profession was throwing parties. I mean, just because your house has fourteen-foot ceilings doesn’t automatically make you a social butterfly, does it. I’ll never forget what I heard her tell an old friend once. ‘I like you, Ginny,’ she said, ‘but do we actually have to get together?’”

  Rebecca smiled, hearing her mother-in-law’s plaintive little voice echoing across the years.

  “And Joe’s father taking those pills,” Tina said. “Not even leaving a note behind. There must have been some sort of depressive chromosome or something, descending from both branches.”

  “Well, but sometimes they were happy,” Rebecca said, because she was thinking, just then, of her twentieth-birthday party, all those people singing to her around the table.

  “And then Aunt Alma, his father’s sister,” Tina said, “forever checking into Sheppard Pratt for little rest cures. Or how about Cousin Ed! Walking in front of that bus.”

  Rebecca hated it when Tina showed off her inside knowledge of the Davitches. She herself had never heard of Cousin Ed, and she had thought Aunt Alma’s rest cures were a secret that Mother Davitch had confided to her alone. She said, “Yes, but in any family—”

  “And the way Joe drove: those crazy left turns. Tell me those weren’t suicidal! Directly into the path of oncoming traffic. More than once I ducked under the dashboard; I bet you had that experience. Or did he do that only with me.”

  No, he had done it with Rebecca.

  When they were courting, it hadn’t alarmed her. She had been so trusting, back then. She remembered riding blissfully next to him, cradling his right hand in her lap as he made a dashing one-handed swerve across two lanes of speeding cars. But later she grew more anxious—especially after Min Foo was born. They had even had a couple of quarrels about it. “Who’s behind the wheel, here: you or me?” he had said, and she had said, “Yes, but my life’s at stake too, after all; mine and the children’s. I have a right to object!”

  “You don’t think that’s the behavior of someone who wanted to do himself in?” Tina asked now.

  For once there was a question mark, American-style, at the end of her sentence. But even so, Rebecca didn’t answer.

  “In any event,” Tina said finally, “at least he didn’t take you along the night of the accident.” She glanced around the table. “I don’t suppose there’s orange juice.”

  “I may have some in the fridge,” Rebecca said, not moving.

  “Ah.”

  Tina waited for a moment. Then she said, “Why don’t I fetch it,” and she slid back her chair and stood up. Her dressing gown made a sound like sand running through a sieve as she crossed the linoleum.

  It was true that Rebecca had sometimes sensed some other quality, a glimmer of something like desperation, lying just beneath the surface of Joe’s exuberance. On occasion she had thought she detected a hollow note in his voice, a forced heartiness as he welcomed guests. Or was it just that in any marriage, you end up knowing more than you should about the other person? (The inner meaning of that sudden hitch to the shoulders, or that flicker in one temple.) Once or twice, after a party, she had found him slumped in the darkened front parlor, staring into space. “Joe?” she had asked. “Aren’t you coming to bed?” and he’d given his head a sharp shake and struggled to his feet.

  She had felt at certain moments—but not always! not for long stretches!—that she was dragging him through an invisible swamp, and Joe was hanging back while she herself, to compensate, grew quicker and more energetic. See how easy it is? We’ll get through this in no time!

  Through Mother Davitch’s stroke, and Aunt Joyce’s death, and Poppy’s moving in with them. Through the constant threat of financial failure—blank squares on the appointment book, painful calls from creditors. Through Mother Davitch’s death, too, and the time they nearly lost Patch to appendicitis.

  But through the good things, as well. Min Foo’s birth. The older girls’ gradual adjustment to Rebecca. Zeb’s admission to medical school. The little pleasures of everyday life, like a perfectly weightless snowfall on a clear December night, or the sound of the children’s jump-rope chants outside on a summer evening.

  “Yeah, sure, sweetheart,” Joe said when she pointed these out, and he would sling an arm around her and draw her close. Even then, though, she might catch a certain clouded look in his eyes, as if he were listening to some private voice that Rebecca couldn’t hear.

  She did believe he loved her. But she couldn’t help feeling, sometimes, that he loved that private voice more.

  Had she been a disappointment to him? That was her greatest fear. Consider how he had first seen her: the girl enjoying the party more than anyone else in the room. He had clung to that image obstinately, no doubt hoping that her happiness was contagious. And it hadn’t been. And besides, she was really no more or less happy than most other people she knew.

  “This place is like a time machine,” Tina said out of the blue.

  Rebecca started, wondering if her head was so transparent. But Tina was drifting obliviously around the kitchen. “Same old round-edged sink as when I was living here, only maybe a mite yellower. Same sticky wooden cabinets. Same scummy little plastic drinking glasses.” She raised her glass of orange juice, demonstrating. “Same baggy, rusty screen door,” she added, turning to gaze through it. “Why! It appears that some young man is carpeting your backyard.”

  “Really?” Rebecca said. She stood up and went over to check. Sure enough, Brick Allen—bronzed and muscular, wearing shorts and boots and nothing else—was unrolling what appeared to be a bristly green stair runner. “It’s grass,” she told Tina. “We’re putting it in for the wedding.”

  “How American. An instant lawn,” Tina said. She opened the door and called out, “Very impressive!”

  Brick raised his head to see who was speaking. He took in Tina—her shimmering robe, the cant of her hip as she leaned against the doorframe—and then he said, “Well, thanks. I’ve been working out with weights.”

  There was the briefest pause, and then Tina gave a husky laugh and turned to include Rebecca. But Rebecca didn’t laugh back.

  She was thinking that if she’d been wise, she would have granted as much significance to Joe’s behavior that first night as he had granted to hers. Goodbye, he had said. Just that easily.

  Not Au revoir, but Goodbye.

  * * *

  Imagine she was walking down the street one day and who should round the corner but Will Allenby. He would look the same as always, except older. (As an afterthought, she grayed his hair and etched two faint but attractive lines at the corners of his mouth.) “Rebecca?” he would say. He would stop. He would look at her. “Rebecca Holmes?”

  Conveniently, he would not have married; or he would have married but found the woman lacking in some w
ay, just never quite up to his memories of Rebecca, and now he was divorced and living nearby—say in one of those luxury high-rise condos overlooking the harbor. Oh, it wasn’t so far-fetched!

  Might-have-been slid imperceptibly into could-still-be—a much more satisfying fantasy. He would invite her for an intimate supper. She would show up with a bottle of wine and he would seat her at a table next to the picture window, with the boat lights twinkling like stars below them and the Domino Sugars sign glowing in the distance. “So tell me, Will—” she would begin, but he would put his hand over hers and say, “Don’t we know each other well enough not to bother with small talk?”

  And he was right; they did. They fit together perfectly, both of them so serious and cerebral and nonsocial, content to spend their evenings reading on the couch. Sometimes they would go to plays or concerts. She hadn’t been to a concert in years! It would be wonderful to walk down the aisle holding somebody’s arm; to have him remove her coat in a sheltering, cherishing way after they were seated; to feel his shoulder pressed against hers as they listened to the music.

  “Where’s Beck?” the girls would ask each other.

  “I think she’s out on a date.”

  “A date!”

  At that moment she would walk in the door, smiling a mysterious smile, her lips a little squashed-looking as if someone had been kissing her.

  * * *

  Macadam College had a vast selection of telephone numbers now, where once there had been only one. “Administration? Admissions? Alumni?” the operator offered. Rebecca said, “Alumni,” in a voice that was already shaky. And when she reached the Alumni Office, she felt her heart speeding up. “I’d like to have an address for one of my old classmates,” she said, gripping the receiver too tightly. She was relieved when she was transferred to another desk. It gave her a moment to compose herself.

  Tina had taken her daughters to lunch, and Poppy was having his nap. This would be Rebecca’s one chance all day for privacy. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, about two inches of it, with her head bent close to the receiver and her free hand cupped protectively around her mouth.

  An older woman asked, “May I help you?”

  “Yes, please,” Rebecca said. “I’d like an address for someone from the Class of ’68. A Willard Allenby.”

  This took so much breath (which she seemed to have very little of) that she ended with a gasp. Thank heaven, she thought, the next wait would no doubt be longer. But instantly the woman said, “Dr. Allenby?”

  “Why, yes, I suppose he—”

  “Dr. Allenby is right here!”

  Rebecca made a sound distressingly like a squawk. “Right here at Macadam, I mean,” the woman told her. “He’s head of the physics department.”

  Rebecca said, “Oh!” in a voice that was still not quite right.

  Mercifully, the woman said, “Wait till I get the directory.” She dropped the receiver with a clatter.

  Rebecca cleared her throat and sat up straighter. She noticed that her ceiling fan was trailing wisps of dust as it spun—rags of dust, actual streamers of dust.

  “Here it is,” the woman said. “Four hundred Linden Street.”

  Rebecca switched the receiver to her left hand and wrote down the address. Her handwriting was as wavery as Poppy’s. She wrote down the telephone numbers for Will’s office and his home—evidently Macadam was still enough of a backwater not to be paranoid about such things—and then she said, “Thanks so much!” in what she hoped was a breezy tone. “Bye!” And she hung up.

  Linden Street was where the full professors lived—the settled, tenured professors with good salaries and established families.

  Will must have a family.

  How could she have supposed he was still alone at that library table, his books still spread around him?

  She tore the page off her memo pad and folded it over and over until it was a tiny paper stick. For one irrational moment, she had an urge to chew it up and swallow it, but instead she tucked it out of sight underneath the telephone. Then she rose, smoothing her skirt, and went back downstairs.

  * * *

  By the afternoon before the wedding, Tina had become just the slightest bit less popular with her daughters. This always happened, Rebecca remembered now. Feelings would get hurt, misunderstandings would arise—the usual untidiness that came from rubbing elbows over a period of days. Patch, for instance, felt that Tina wasn’t being nice enough to Jeep. Not only that; she was being too nice to Barry. It turned out that Patch had entertained high hopes for Tina’s derailing the wedding. In her woman-of-the-world way, she would see Barry for the cad he was and then, by some magic, persuade NoNo not to marry him. Instead, Patch said, Tina had cozied up to him; she had made a fool of herself over him; she had behaved just shockingly, linking elbows with him at every opportunity and laughing her throaty laugh directly into his face, not even acknowledging the chair that Jeep pulled out for her at the table but deliberately choosing another chair, far away from Jeep and next to Barry. “Barry, of all people!” Patch told Rebecca. (She had stopped by for just a moment to drop off her youngest.) “We’re talking about a man who makes calls on his cell phone during dinner. Calls his own answering machine to leave himself a message. ‘Don’t forget my dress shoes in the back closet,’ he says. Right in the middle of a joke Jeep was telling!”

  “Oh, honey, Barry didn’t mean . . . Your mother didn’t mean any harm,” Rebecca said.

  Although she couldn’t help feeling guiltily pleased.

  Then Tina suggested to Peter that he go along on the honeymoon. “Think about it,” she told him. “They’re planning to leave you in this mausoleum over the weekend with Rebecca. Practically a stranger! I don’t know about you, but I would never stand for such a thing. The three of you are a family now, tell them. You deserve to come too.”

  It was unlikely he’d have followed her instructions—he just smiled uncertainly at his shoes and then slid a glance toward his father—but NoNo took offense anyhow. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” she told Tina in a low, trembling voice. “Barry and I have three days only, three short days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday; that’s all I’m asking, and now you have the nerve to say—”

  “All right! All right! Never mind me!” Tina said, holding up both jeweled hands. “I’m just the fly on the wall, here.”

  Then she turned back to Peter and gave him a sympathetic, I-tried-my-best shrug.

  This scene took place in the family room upstairs, because downstairs they had a paying event. A man had engaged the entire public space—both parlors and the dining room—just so he could propose to the woman he loved. Evidently the Open Arms was where they had first met, at some sort of charity function. The details, he had said, he would leave to Rebecca, but he wanted this to be a grand and formal occasion with a tuxedoed waiter, a four-course dinner, and a strolling violinist. So Rebecca hired Dixon, who looked elegant in his rented tux although, sad to say, he had started growing one of those skinny jawline beards that seemed more trouble than shaving; and she asked Biddy to do the food and Emmy to play the piano, since she didn’t know any violinists. Emmy was diligent if not inspired; she sat at the old upright, wearing a tank top and a miniskirt and approximately fifteen earrings, and plunked out Chopin études while the couple sipped champagne on the front-parlor sofa. The man was gray-haired and portly, his cherubic face shining with sweat even though the air-conditioning was cranked so high that you could hardly hear Emmy’s playing. The woman was gray-haired as well but very pretty in a soft, genteel way, and she wore a trim navy dress and tiny navy pumps with straps across the insteps. Rebecca was able to observe all this because she kept inventing excuses to go down and check how they were doing. First she stepped in to welcome them, and then to say that hors d’oeuvres would be served in the other parlor (since it seemed a shame not to employ all the space they had hired), and then to announce dinner. She had the impression that the woman couldn’t think what to make of the
situation. Upon arrival she had asked where the other guests were, and now she kept giving Rebecca anxious, searching smiles as if she were hard of hearing, although plainly she was not.

  “This is a huge mistake,” Biddy whispered, slicing hearts of palm in the kitchen. “Such an unprivate proposal. What if she says no? I’ll die. I’ll burst out crying.”

  She was serving a meal with a valentine motif: everything pink or heart-shaped or referring to hearts in some way. The main course would be beef heart. Talk about mistake! Rebecca thought. But of course she kept that to herself.

  When she returned to the family room, she found NoNo flipping angrily through a magazine while Tina told Barry the story of her own proposal from the Englishman. “We were staying at the country house of friends of his,” she said, “and one evening over drinks our host said, ‘Tina, darling, I wonder if you could fancy linking up with Nelson, here.’ That was Nelson’s notion of a proposal. He was scared to ask me himself, he said later. Wouldn’t you think I’d have been warned off by that! The man had no backbone whatever. I’m surprised he could sit upright in a chair.”

  She said nothing about how Joe had proposed, Rebecca noticed.

  Peter and Poppy were watching a sitcom on TV. Or Poppy was watching. Peter wore a tense, fixed expression, and a sudden roar of canned laughter didn’t cause even a smile to cross his face. “Want to come downstairs and help with the dinner?” Rebecca asked him.

  He rose so dutifully that she hurried to say, “Not that you have to or anything.”

  “Go on, son; I’ll be down in a minute,” Barry told him. “We’ve got to be leaving pretty soon anyway. Big day tomorrow, hey, guy?”

  Peter gave him a wan smile and trailed Rebecca out of the room.

  What on earth would she do with this child for a whole weekend?

  In the kitchen, Biddy was moaning over the coeur à la crème she’d just unmolded. “Beautiful!” Rebecca told her, but Biddy wailed, “How can you say that? It’s a fiasco!”

  She must be referring to the slight indentation at the center. “Camouflage it,” Rebecca said briskly. “Didn’t I see some strawberries somewhere?”