Back When We Were Grownups Page 14

  “Is that what you’re wearing to the tea-dance?” he asked her.

  “No, honey, I don’t suppose I’ll ever again wear it in all my life,” she said. “I just hang on to it because it’s what I met your grandpa in; stepgrandpa.”

  “Well, the color’s nice.”

  She laughed and turned back to the closet.

  It was silly to worry about her appearance. This wasn’t a date, for heaven’s sake! This was two middle-aged ex-classmates catching up with each other. Having a bite to eat and then, no doubt, parting for good, because the chances were they had nothing at all to talk about anymore.

  When she hung the blue dress in its place, a wistful, sweet, lilac scent drifted from its folds. But she supposed it was just the smell of aged fabric. It couldn’t be Amy’s engagement party, after all these years.

  * * *

  On Sunday afternoon, NoNo and Barry came back from their honeymoon. NoNo had a toasted look while Barry, who was fairer-skinned, had turned a ruddy pink with a brighter patch across his nose. (They’d borrowed a friend’s beach cottage in Ocean City.)

  NoNo made a big fuss over Peter, kissing him hello and asking about his weekend, offering him his choice of restaurants for tonight’s first meal as a family. Peter dug a toe into the carpet and mumbled that it would be nice to eat at home. NoNo said, “Oh. At home,” her forehead cross-hatched with worry because she had never had the slightest talent as a cook. But Barry said, “Great. I’ll grill some steaks.” Then he and Peter went upstairs for Peter’s belongings.

  As soon as they were gone, Rebecca said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, NoNo. Do you still go to that book club of yours?”

  “Mm-hmm,” NoNo said. “Why?”

  “I was thinking how wonderful that must be, having people to talk with seriously. I wish I belonged to something like that. It seems I never get involved in any intellectual conversations anymore.”

  NoNo was examining her wedding ring, turning her left hand gracefully this way and that.

  “So,” Rebecca said. “Do you think maybe I could join?”

  “Join?” NoNo said. She let her hand drop. “Join my book club? But . . . this is a group of all women. You know?”

  “Well, I’m a woman,” Rebecca said with a feathery laugh.

  “I mean, it’s like a, practically group therapy. You wouldn’t believe the subjects we get onto, sometimes! Emotional issues, and relationships and such. I just think it would feel awfully funny to have a relative there. I mean any relative; my sisters, too, I mean. I’m not trying to be—”

  “No, of course not. I wasn’t using my head,” Rebecca said. “Goodness! That would be awkward!”

  Then Barry and Peter came clattering down the stairs, and she looked up at them with a big, false smile and asked if they had everything.

  It probably wouldn’t have been the right kind of book club, anyway. She could talk about emotional issues any old time; it seemed she was always doing that, with every passing repairman.

  * * *

  Monday afternoon at two—the first available appointment—she got her hair washed and set at Martelle’s Maison of Beauty, but she came home and shampooed thoroughly under a beating shower because Martelle had been having an off day and gave her a headful of frizz. So she ended up with her usual look: the two beige fans at her temples. She put on a long blue flowered skirt, a lighter-blue tunic from Pakistan dotted around the neckline with tiny mirrors, and dark-blue panty hose to make her ankles look thinner. After checking her reflection she wound a red-and-white paisley scarf several times around her throat, although the temperature was in the eighties. Then she stepped into a pair of red pumps. (She had heard somewhere that men found red shoes provocative.)

  Last of all, she blotted her face with powder, brushed her eyelashes with mascara, and applied a coat of lipstick the same shade of red as her shoes. But she wiped most of the lipstick off again, because she decided it made her look garish.

  After that she sat down in the rear parlor, since it was only four-thirty and she didn’t have to leave until six. She folded her hands in her lap and did nothing, gazing straight ahead and trying to remember not to touch her eyes so that she wouldn’t end up looking like a raccoon. From time to time Poppy poked his head in and stared at her, but mercifully, he asked no questions. She had set out a cold supper earlier and told him to eat when he liked. Around five-thirty she heard a chair scrape across the kitchen linoleum, followed by the clinking of cutlery against china, and she thought of going out to keep him company but instead she continued sitting there. For one thing, she felt the need to hang on to her composure. For another, talking to Poppy would wear away what was left of her lipstick.

  At ten till six she made one last trip to the bathroom, and then she gave Poppy a wave from the kitchen doorway. “Night-night,” she said, taking care to use no words that required pressing her lips together. By now it was 5:55. Recalling her grandchildren’s superstition about clocks, she made a wish. She wished for dignity, was all. Just let her get through this evening without appearing foolish. She took her purse from the hall radiator and walked out the front door.

  It was a muggy, heavy evening, cloudy but without a hope of rain to cool things off. When she got into her car, a blast of stored-up heat instantly dampened her powder. She started the engine and switched on the air-conditioning, which made her hair fly every which way. All her primping had been for nothing. She gave a despairing glance toward the rearview mirror before she pulled into the street.

  Her car was an ’84 Chevy, rust-speckled and noisy and given to swaying dizzily on sharp curves. (She was always threatening to turn it into a planter.) It was littered front and back with her grandchildren’s odds and ends—their fast-food bags, soft-drink cans, old comic books, and crumpled, graying gym socks. Now she wished she had thought to clean it. She felt a brief flash of resentment: she used to keep her things so nice, before she met up with the Davitches.

  At first, the drive was no different from one she might take any day. She passed the same tall, stern old houses, most of them transformed into offices or shops or cheap apartments. She veered south into a stretch of Laundromats, Chinese restaurants, liquor stores, boarded-up grocery stores. Rush hour was practically over, and she slid easily through a series of intersections. She stopped at a red light where a boy was peddling cellophane tubes of single, imprisoned-looking roses. At the next light a cadaverous man in a winter jacket held up a placard saying he was hungry, sick, tired, and sad. A child approached with a dirty rag and a bottle of Windex, but Rebecca shook her head.

  Then she was driving through the frayed hem of the city, through a wasteland of broken-paned factories and tarp-covered mountains of tires. No doubt there was some high-speed, multi-lane road to Macadam these days, but she turned onto the old one. The scenery grew more spacious—weedy and brambly and shrubby. She was sorry to find, though, that the rolling pastures of her girlhood had been replaced by housing developments. The developments had an established, dowdy look to them; she could tell they weren’t brand-new. Above-ground pools crowded nearly every backyard. A bridge was spray-painted with valentines and Trust Jesus and, in childishly crooked letters, I Still Like Larry. A long, low, brick elementary school sent a Dreamsicle-colored sunset glaring back from its picture windows.

  Just beyond the railroad crossing she turned right, and several miles later she came upon a tasteful black-and-brass sign reading Macadam. (In her day there’d been a huge billboard: ENTERING MACADAM, HOME OF MACADAM COLLEGE AND LYON INDUSTRIES, INC. “You Can Rely on Lyon for All Your Janitorial Supplies.”) She passed the eastern edge of the campus—Federal-style brick buildings under large old craggy trees, just as she remembered. The town itself, though, had changed, and not for the better. It seemed scrappier, more chopped up, a hodgepodge of hastily constructed fast-food joints and tattoo parlors and taverns. And Myrtle’s (when she found it, after two wrong turns) had become a CD store. Posters for various rock groups filled the window,
although the white stucco above it still bore the ghost of the old name where the letters had been pried off.

  It felt to her as if a bowling ball had come to rest in the pit of her stomach. Her heartbeat lurched and stammered.

  Catty-corner from the CD store was the Maple Tree (neither Oak nor Elm), looking out of place with its richly varnished door and forest-green awning. She parked almost squarely in front of it. First she craned toward the rearview mirror and patted her hair down, checked her lipstick, and arranged her features into more lilting, upward angles. Then she picked up her purse and got out, plucking at the back of her skirt where it seemed glued to her thighs. Her watch read ten minutes till seven; so probably Will wasn’t here yet. Still, just in case, she made sure to step light-footedly as she approached the entrance.

  Inside, the semi-darkness and the smell of musty carpet combined to make her feel that she had walked into a closet of stored woolens. A girl with long blond hair stood waiting with an armful of menus. “Good evening!” she trilled.

  Rebecca said, “I’m meeting someone, but I don’t suppose he’s—”

  “Would that be him?”

  She followed the girl’s eyes. In the dimness she could barely make out the dozen or so tables, but she saw that two of them were occupied—one by a dressed-up young couple, the other by a skinny old man. “No,” she said.

  And then she said, “Oh.”

  He was sitting by the window, his beaky profile silhouetted against the dark curtain and his hair a radiant cloud of wild white corkscrews. When she started walking toward him (leading the hostess, now, instead of following), he sent her a glance, and she could tell that he was equally uncertain. He hesitated, then half stood, then hesitated again before rising to his full height. “Rebecca?” he said.

  She said, “Hello, Will.”

  She held out her hand, and he took it. (This must surely be the first time they had shaken each other’s hand.) His fingers were as knuckly and wiry as ever, but there was a difference in the texture of his skin, a kind of graininess that she saw in his face, too, now that she was close enough—a sandy look to his cheeks, a trio of fine lines straining across his forehead. His lips, which had once been very full and sculptured, were thinner and more sharply defined. He was wearing a wilted suit jacket over an open-necked white shirt—elderly clothes, sagging off his bony frame in a slack and elderly way.

  She settled in the chair opposite him, and he sat back down. “What happened to your long golden braid?” he asked her.

  She raised a hand to her head. “My . . . ?” she said. “Oh. I cut it off. It was too much trouble to take care of.”

  A menu arrived on her plate, and another on Will’s. The hostess said, “May I tell Marvin what you’re having to drink?”

  “Who’s Marvin?” Will asked.

  “Iced tea for me,” Rebecca said, although she could have used something stronger.

  Will said, “Just water, please.”

  “Sparkling, or still?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Tap,” Rebecca volunteered. (That much she felt sure of, although the question would not even have been thought of in their dating days.)

  As soon as the hostess had left, Will turned back to Rebecca, plainly expecting her to begin the conversation. Instead, she spent some time placing her purse just so on her left, then unfolding her napkin in slow motion and smoothing it across her lap.

  Why was she acting so gracious, she wondered—so matronly, so controlled?

  It was the way she behaved with strangers. Really, he was a stranger.

  But she said, “It’s wonderful to see you, Will!”

  He blinked. (She may have been a bit loud.) He said, “Yes, me too. For me to see you, I mean.”

  There was a pause.

  “And all except for the braid, you look exactly the same,” he added.

  “Yes, fat as ever!” she said, laughing brightly.

  He cleared his throat. She rearranged her napkin.

  “I took the Poe Highway over here,” she said. “Goodness, things have changed! So many new housing developments, or new to me, at least, and Macadam looks very different. I doubt I’d even—”

  A young man dressed in black set their drinks in front of them. “So,” he said, whipping out a pad and pen. “Decided what you’re having?”

  Rebecca said, “Not quite yet, thanks,” but Will said, “Oh, sorry, wait a minute, let’s see, what am I—”

  He took a pair of rimless glasses from his breast pocket and hooked them over his ears. (Now he seemed downright ancient. She could draw back from him and imagine that she had never seen him before.) “You go first,” he told Rebecca.

  She said, “Well, I . . . The salmon, I guess.” It was the first thing her eyes landed on.

  Will was peering at his menu. “Salmon, veal, rib roast . . .” he said, his index finger traveling down the page. “Ah, maybe the rib roast.”

  “And how would you like that cooked, sir?” the waiter asked.

  “Medium, please. No, better make it well done.”

  “Well done it is,” the waiter said, writing on his pad.

  “On second thought,” Will told him, “I believe I’ll have the Award-Winning Swordfish.”

  “Swordfish,” the waiter said. He scratched out what he’d written.

  “But without the Caramelized Onion Sauce,” Will said. “Unless . . .” he said. He beetled his snarly white eyebrows. “Would it still be the actual Award-Winning Swordfish if it didn’t have the sauce?”

  “It wouldn’t be the actual Award-Winning Swordfish in any case, sir,” the waiter said, “because that one was eaten by the judges.”

  Rebecca laughed, but Will just said, “All right, then, no sauce. And no dressing on the salad.” He looked across at her. “I’m trying to watch my cholesterol.”

  This surprised her at least as much as his having Caller ID. Mentally, she supposed, she had sealed him in amber—imagined him still a college boy wolfing down milk shakes and burgers.

  “I’m not used to eating out much,” Will told her once the waiter was gone. “Generally I cook at home. I make my famous chili. You remember my chili.”

  “Oh! Your chili,” she said. She did remember, she realized. Or at least she remembered Will chopping onions into tiny, uniform squares, and Mrs. Allenby tut-tutting at the red spatters across her clean stovetop.

  “My particular recipe constitutes a completely balanced meal,” Will was saying. “I mix up a double batch every Sunday afternoon, and I divide it into seven containers and that’s what I eat all week.”

  “All week?”

  “Now I’ll have an extra container on hand because of this evening. I’m not sure yet how I’ll deal with that.”

  “But don’t you get awfully bored, eating the same meal every night?”

  “Not a bit,” he said. “Or if I do, what of it? I’ve never understood this country’s phobia about boredom. Why should we be constantly diverted and entertained? I prefer to sink into my life, even into the tedious parts. Sometimes I like to sit and just stare into space. I don’t require newness just for newness’ sake.”

  “Well . . . you’re right, I guess,” Rebecca said. “Goodness! I don’t know why we mind boredom so much.”

  “I have my lunches in the college cafeteria. Spinach salad and yogurt.”

  “That sounds extremely healthful,” she told him.

  The waiter set a basket of breads between them, and Rebecca selected a roll and put it on her bread plate. Then she reached for the butter. The silence was that obvious kind where every gesture becomes important. The slightest turn of her wrist seemed almost to make a noise.

  “So,” she said finally, “I gather you’ve adjusted to living on your own, then.”

  “Yes, I can’t complain. I rent a very nice apartment over on Linden Street.”

  “An apartment,” she repeated. (Cancel that image of the tenured-professor’s house.)

  “In the home of Mrs. Flick.
You remember Dr. Flick of the English department, don’t you? She started renting out her top floor after he died. I have a good-sized living room, dining room, kitchenette, bedroom, and study. The study can double as a guest room if my daughter ever wants to stay over.”

  “Oh, Will, you have a daughter?”

  “Seventeen years old—a senior in high school. Beatrice, her name is.”

  Beatrice! Rebecca was struck dumb with admiration. Beatrice would be a female version of Tristram. Rebecca pictured her in a modest muslin dress from the nineteenth century, although she knew that was unlikely. She pictured Beatrice and her father joined in some scholarly endeavor—Beatrice reading aloud while Will nodded soberly in his rocking chair by the fire.

  “But that’s nothing compared to you,” Will was saying.

  “Me?”

  “You have four daughters, you mentioned.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m way ahead of you!” She took a gulp of iced tea—too big a gulp; she nearly choked. “I’ve got grandchildren, even! Six. I mean seven. Because my husband’s three girls were older, you know; his girls from his previous marriage.”

  “And how did he happen to pass away? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  His delicate wording, along with the clumsy look of his mouth as he spoke—a sort of crumpled look, as if he had too many teeth—made her feel the need to set him at ease. “He died in a car wreck,” she said forthrightly. “It was very sudden. Well, a car wreck is always sudden, of course. But I was so unprepared! And so young! I was twenty-six years old. And his girls had just barely gotten to where they admitted I existed.”

  “Couldn’t you have sent them to their relatives? They must have had some, someplace.”

  “Well, only their mother.”

  “Their mother!” Will said.

  “But she’d remarried; she lived in England. Sending the children to her would . . . In fact, the subject never came up.”

  Will shook his head. “Personally,” he said, “I would find that situation intolerable.”