Ladder of Years Read online

  “Even?”

  “Even with the homeless or something. I don’t know,” Delia said. “I don’t know what I mean!”

  Eliza leaned forward and set her cheek against Delia’s. “You’re going to be fine,” she told her. “This little rest is going to work wonders, take my word. And meanwhile, Dee—” She was about to turn away, but one last thought must have struck her. “Meanwhile, remember Great-Uncle Roscoe’s favorite motto.”

  “What was that?”

  “‘Never do anything you can’t undo.’”

  “I’ll bear it in mind,” Delia told her.

  “Uncle Roscoe may have been a grump,” Eliza said, “but he did show common sense now and then.”

  Delia said, “Drive safely.”

  She stood watching after Eliza—that short, economical, energetic figure—until she disappeared down the sidewalk. Then she went back in the house for her bag.

  Climbing the stairs, she thought, But if you never did anything you couldn’t undo—she set a hand on the splintery railing—you’d end up doing nothing at all, she thought. She was tempted to turn around and run after Eliza to tell her that, but then she couldn’t have borne saying goodbye all over again.

  8

  Her book that night was The Sun Also Rises, but she didn’t manage to finish it because she kept getting distracted. It was Friday, the start of the weekend. The traffic beneath her window had a livelier, more festive sound, and the voices of passersby were louder. “Hoo-ee! Here we come!” a teenage boy cried out. Momentarily, Delia lost track of the sentence she was reading. Around eight o’clock someone crossed the porch—not Belle but someone in flat-soled shoes walking slowly, as if weary or sad—and she lowered her book and listened. The front door opened, he entered the house, the stairs creaked upward one step at a time. Then the doorknob across the hall gave a rattle, and she thought, Oh. The other boarder.

  She returned to her book, but every now and then a sound would break through her concentration—a hollow cough, the sliding of metal hangers along a closet rod. When she heard the shower running, she rose and tiptoed over to her door to make sure it was locked. Then she climbed back into bed and reread the paragraph she had just finished.

  An hour or so later, Belle arrived. She had a man with her. Delia heard his hearty, booming laugh—not a laugh belonging to anyone she knew. “Now, be serious!” Belle said once. The TV came on downstairs, and the refrigerator door slammed shut with a dull clunk.

  ———

  Mr. Lamb turned out to be an emaciated man in his forties, with straight brown hair and sunken eyes. Delia met him in the upstairs hall as she was setting out on some errands the following morning. “Hello,” she said, and passed on, having resolved in advance to keep their exchange to a minimum. But she needn’t have worried. Mr. Lamb flattened his back against the wall and smiled miserably at his shoes, mumbling something unintelligible. He was probably no happier than she about having to share the bathroom.

  She was looking for a bank that kept Saturday hours. She wanted to cash Friday’s paycheck. The check was drawn on First Farmers’, just north of the square, but she found First Farmers’ closed, and so she walked on to Bay Borough Federal. It was a cool, breezy day, with dark clouds overhead that turned the air almost lilac; and this part of town, which she had not seen since the afternoon she arrived, now looked completely different to her. It looked out of date, somehow. The buildings were so faded they seemed not colored but hand tinted, like an antique photograph.

  “Would you be able to cash this for me?” she asked the teller at Bay Borough Federal.

  The teller—a woman in squinty rhinestoned glasses—barely glanced at the signature before nodding. “Zeke Pomfret? No problem,” she said.

  So Delia signed over the first real paycheck of her life and received a few crisp bills in return. She was surprised at how much the taxes and whatnot could eat away from a salary.

  Weber Street, East Street. Diagonally across the square. She carried her head high and set her feet down with precision. She might have been the heroine in some play or movie. And her intended audience, of course, was Sam.

  It wasn’t that she looked forward to his visit, certainly. She dreaded having to explain herself; she knew how lame and contradictory all her reasons would sound to him. And yet as early as yesterday afternoon, some part of her mind had been making its devious calculations. Let’s say it’s two hours to Baltimore. Eliza could get home around, oh, say, four-thirty, so Sam could be here by six-thirty. Maybe seven. Or supposing he decided to finish up at the office first, supposing he had to buy gas … And then later that night: He must be waiting for the weekend. That would be much more sensible.

  Imagine if he came upon her this minute, heading toward the library for Saturday’s book. Or pausing on the way home to rummage through a table of mugs in front of Katy’s Kitchenware. Or stepping out of the Pinchpenny with the navy knit dress in a bag. Imagine if he were watching from the boardinghouse porch as she rounded the corner of George Street. He would see her skimming along, wearing professional gray, entirely at ease in this town he had never laid eyes on before. He would think, Could that really be Delia?

  Or imagine if she climbed the stairs and found him waiting at the door of her room. “Why, Sam,” she would say serenely, and she would draw her keys from her handbag—so official-looking, room key and office key on Mr. Pomfret’s chrome ring—and open the door and tilt her head, inviting him inside. Or he would be inside already, having persuaded Belle to admit him. He would be standing at one of the windows. He would turn and see her entering with her burdens—her library book and her tea mug and new dress—and, “Here, let me help you with those,” he would say, and she would say, “Thanks. I can manage.”

  But he wasn’t there after all, and she set her things on the bed in total silence.

  She went downstairs to pay her rent. Belle was home, she could tell. She heard sounds from behind the celery-colored door leading off the hall. She knocked and Belle called, “Come in!” meanwhile squeaking something, whirring something. It was a stationary bicycle, Delia discovered when she stepped inside. Belle was pedaling madly, flushed and overheated in a pink sweat suit strewn with tiny satin bows. “Whew!” she said when she saw Delia. Her living room, like the rest of the house, seemed furnished with pieces earlier tenants had discarded. A dingy plush sofa faced the TV; the coffee table bore a loopy design of ring-shaped water stains.

  “I just wanted to pay my rent,” Delia told her.

  “Oh, thanks,” Belle said, and without slowing her pedaling she stuffed the folded bills up one sleeve. “Everything all right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Great,” Belle said, and she leaned diligently over the handlebars as Delia closed the door again.

  Delia planned to go next to the Gobble-Up for some lunch things, but just as she was leaving the house a young man in uniform arrived on the porch. She thought at first he was some kind of soldier; the uniform was a khaki color, and his hair was prickly short. “Miz Grinstead?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Chuck Akers, from the Polies.”

  It took her a moment to translate that.

  “Think I could have a word with you?” he asked.

  “Certainly,” she said. She turned to lead him inside and then realized she had nowhere to take him. Her bedroom was out of the question, and she couldn’t very well use Belle’s living room. So she turned back and asked, “What can I do for you?” and they ended up conducting their business right there on the porch.

  “You are Miz Cordelia F. Grinstead,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I understand you came here of your own free will.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Nobody kidnapped you, coerced you …”

  “Nobody else had anything to do with it.”

  “Well, I surely wish you had thought to make that clear before you left.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Ne
xt time I will.”

  Next time!

  She wondered when on earth she supposed that would be.

  Saturday, Sunday. The elaborate filling of empty white hours, the glad pounce upon the most inconsequential task. Saturday evening she ate at home, little cartons of Chinese takeout, and she read Daisy Miller late into the night. Sunday breakfast was tea and a grocery-store muffin in bed, but she made an event of lunch. She ate at the Bay Arms Restaurant, a stodgy, heavily draped and carpeted establishment, where all the other tables were occupied by families in church clothes. Her inclination was to get the meal over with as fast as possible, but she forced herself to order a soup course, a main course, and a dessert, and she worked her way through all this in a measured and leisurely fashion, fixing her gaze upon a point in the middle distance.

  Once Susie had announced, during a particularly feminist stage in her life, that every woman ought to learn how to dine alone in a formal restaurant without a book. Delia wished Susie could see her now.

  In fact, maybe Sam would bring the children with him when he came. Maybe they would walk right into the Bay Arms; it was not impossible that they would track her down. She was wearing her new navy dress from the Pinchpenny. It looked very becoming, she thought. She requested a second cup of coffee and sat on awhile.

  Out of nowhere, she longed for a cigarette, although she had not smoked since tenth grade.

  When she left the restaurant she headed north to the library, planning to choose that night’s reading. But the library door was locked tight and the venetian blinds were slanted shut. She should have realized the place would be closed on Sundays. Now she would have to buy a book—invest actual money.

  In the pharmacy on George Street, she found one rack of paperbacks—mostly mysteries, a few romances. She chose a romance called Moon Above Wyndham Moor. A woman in a long cloak was swooning on the cover, precariously supported by a bearded man who encircled her waist with his left arm while he brandished a sword with his right. Delia hid the book in her purse after she had paid for it. Then she continued toward Belle’s, taking quick, firm steps so that anybody watching would think, That woman looks completely self-reliant.

  But there was no one watching.

  She remembered how, as a child, she used to arrange herself in the front yard whenever visitors were due. She remembered one time when her great-uncle Roscoe was expected, and she had placed her doll cradle on the grass and assumed a pretty pose next to it till Uncle Roscoe stepped out of his car. “Why, looky there!” he cried. “It’s little Lady Delia.” He smelled of cough drops, the bitter kind. She had thought she retained no mental picture of Uncle Roscoe, and she was startled to find him bobbing up like this, shifting his veiny leather gladstone bag to his other hand so he could clamp her shoulder as they proceeded toward the house. But what had the occasion been? Why had he come to visit, wearing his rusty black suit? She suspected she would rather not know the answer.

  “I was singing my doll a lullaby,” she had told him in a confiding tone.

  She had always been such a false child, so eager to conform to the grown-ups’ views of her.

  ———

  Moon Above Wyndham Moor was a disappointment. It just didn’t seem very believable, somehow. Delia kept lowering it to stare blankly at the dim, far corners of the room. She checked to see how many pages remained. She cocked her head toward the sound of Mr. Lamb’s radio. He had been playing it all weekend, though never so loudly that she could decipher the announcer’s words. On the porch overhang outside, raindrops were falling one by one. She missed the noises of the family across the street. They must have closed their windows against the weather.

  Is he not going to come at all, then?

  On Monday morning Mr. Pomfret let her know, in a roundabout way, that he had learned the truth. “I see you have a new dress, Mrs. Grinstead,” he said, eyeing her significantly. But she pretended not to understand, and by noon he had drifted back to “Miss.” Not that she much cared. She felt oddly lackluster today. The rain didn’t help. She had been forced to buy an umbrella at the pharmacy, and during lunch hour she went to the dime store and purchased an inexpensive gray cardigan made of something synthetic. Miss Grinstead’s standards were slipping, it appeared. She poked her hands dispiritedly through the clingy, tubelike sleeves.

  Because of the rain, she couldn’t picnic on her usual park bench, and she wasn’t up to the social demands of Rick-Rack’s or the Bay Arms; so she took her cup of yogurt back to her room. She opened the front door, stepping over the mail, and started up the stairs. Then she halted and turned to look back at one of the envelopes on the floor.

  A cream-colored envelope—or more like custard-colored, really. She knew that shade well. And she knew the name embossed in brown on the upper-left-hand corner: SAMUEL A. GRINSTEAD, M.D.

  He would settle for just writing her a letter?

  She stooped to pick it up. Mrs. Delia Grinstead, the address read (Miss Manners would be appalled). George Street, house w/ low front porch next door to Gobble-Up Grocery. Bay Borough, Maryland.

  She took it to her room before she opened it. Delia, he wrote. No Dear. Delia, it is my understanding from Eliza that …

  He had used the office typewriter, the one with the tipsy e, and he hadn’t bothered to change the margins from when she’d done the bills. The body of the letter was scarcely four inches wide.

  Delia, it is my understanding from Eliza that you have requested some time on your own due to various stresses including your father’s recent death, etc.

  Naturally, I would much rather you had forewarned us. You cannot have been unaware of the anxiety you would cause, simply strolling off down the beach like that and disappearing. Do you have any idea how it feels to

  Nor am I entirely clear on what “stresses” you are referring to. Of course I realize you and your father were close. But his death after all occurred four and a half months ago. and frankly I feel Perhaps you view me as one of the stresses. If so this is regrettable but I have always tried to be a satisfactory husb vowed while I was growing up that I would be a rock for my wife and children and to the best of my belief I have fulfilled that vow and I don’t understand what but if you have any complaints against me I am certainly willing to hear what they are.

  In the meantime you may rest assured that I will not invade your privacy. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  xxxxxxxxx

  Sam

  He had made his first four corrections with the hyphen key—easy for Delia to read through—but the fifth was so thoroughly x-ed over that she couldn’t figure it out even when she held the letter up to the light. Well, no doubt that was for the best. It was probably something even more obtuse than his other remarks, and Lord knows those were obtuse enough.

  Not invade her privacy! Just sit back and give up on her, as if she were a missing pet or mitten or dropped penny!

  She might have known, she reflected. All this proved was how right she had been to leave.

  Her teeth were chattering, and her new sweater was no help. Instead of eating her lunch, she slipped off her shoes and climbed into bed. She lay shivering beneath the one blanket, with her jaw set against the cold and her arms wrapped around her ribs, hugging her own self tightly.

  9

  No wonder she’d been unable to picture winter in Bay Borough! Underneath, she realized now, she had expected Sam to come fetch her long before then. She resembled those runaway children who never, no matter how far they travel, truly mean to leave home.

  So anyhow. Here she was. And the entire rest of her life was stretching out empty before her.

  She took to sitting on her bed in the evenings and staring into space. It was too much to say that she was thinking. She certainly had no conscious thoughts, or at any rate, none that mattered. Most often she was, oh, just watching the air, as she used to do when she was small. She used to gaze for
hours at those multicolored specks that swarm in a room’s atmosphere. Then Linda had informed her they were dust motes. That took the pleasure out of it, somehow. Who cares about mere dust? But now she thought Linda was wrong. It was air she watched, an infinity of air endlessly rearranging itself, and the longer she watched the more soothed she felt, the more mesmerized, the more peaceful.

  She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always known that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell—in which case, who was “she”? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing.

  Often she didn’t begin the night’s reading till nine or nine-thirty, which meant she could no longer finish a novel in one sitting; so she switched to short stories instead. She would read a story, watch the air awhile, and read another. She would mark her page with a library slip and listen to the sounds from outdoors—the swish of cars, the chirring of insects, the voices of the children in the house across the street. On hot nights the older children slept on a second-floor porch, and they always talked among themselves until their parents intervened. “Am I going to have to come upstairs?” was their father’s direst threat. That would quiet them, but only for a minute.

  Delia wondered if Sam knew that Carroll was scheduled for tennis lessons the middle two weeks in July. You couldn’t depend on Carroll to remember on his own. And did anyone recall that this was dentist month? Well, probably Eliza did. Without Eliza, Delia could never have left her family so easily.

  She wasn’t sure if that was something to be thankful for.

  The fact was, Delia was expendable. She was an extra. She had lived out her married life like a little girl playing house, and always there’d been a grown-up standing ready to take over—her sister or her husband or her father.