Back When We Were Grownups Read online

  This hurt her feelings, for some reason. She knew he meant to sympathize, but she couldn’t help imagining a note of judgment in his voice. She said, “Everything ended up fine, though! Just fine! I’ve managed very well. I run a little business out of my home, hosting parties. Joe started that—my husband. And the girls are all grown up now. You should meet them! It’s this huge, big, jumbled family; nothing like what you and I were used to when we were children. Oh, isn’t it amazing, how life turns out? Could you have imagined we’d be sitting here, waiting for swordfish and salmon, back when we were eating pancakes at Myrtle’s Family Restaurant?”

  On cue, the waiter set their plates in front of them—Will’s swordfish starkly naked, Rebecca’s salmon buried beneath a conglomeration of capers, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, black and green olives, and pine nuts. Two salads arrived, Rebecca’s smothered in blue cheese dressing. “Fresh-ground pepper?” the waiter asked, brandishing what looked like a mammoth chess piece. Will shook his head. To make up for him, Rebecca said, “Yes, please!” even though she was longing for the two of them to be left alone. One twist of the grinder and she said, “Okay! Thanks!” Finally, the waiter walked off.

  “Where was I? Myrtle’s Family Restaurant,” Rebecca said. She speared an olive. “Oh, doesn’t it seem long ago? But of course, it was long ago. And yet, in another way . . . I can remember just like yesterday that time in ninth grade when we went to the drive-in movie. I had such a crush on you, and you thought we were just friends. You thought I was only this kid you’d gone to nursery school with.”

  The olive had a pit, she discovered as she bit down. She removed it with a thumb and forefinger and hid it under her roll. Luckily, Will’s eyes were on his plate and he didn’t seem to notice.

  “A bunch of us went to the movies,” she said, “in Ben Biddix’s older brother’s pickup truck. Remember? Ben paid his brother five dollars to take us since none of us could drive yet. And we all sat out on that grassy spot down in front of the screen—do you remember this?”

  Will shook his head.

  “It was you and me and the Nolan twins and Ben and his brother and Nita Soames, who was going out with Ben’s brother at the time. In fact I think she eventually married him. The night was really clear and warm with a balmy breeze, a kind of promising breeze, you know that kind? You were sitting next to me and I put my hand down flat in the grass, hoping to seem nonchalant, and then I inched it a little closer to your hand and waited, and then a little closer; so finally just the sides of our hands were barely touching, or maybe not even touching but warming each other, sort of—”

  “You broke my heart,” Will said.

  All this time he’d gone on gazing at his plate, keeping his face so impassive that she wasn’t sure he was listening. And she wasn’t sure even now, because there she was, magically transported to that starlit evening in 1960 when everything was poised to begin, and meanwhile he had leapt forward to the very end of the story. She set down her fork. The olive was sitting high in her throat like a thick, heavy stone.

  “You never gave me the slightest warning,” Will said. He took hold of both sides of the table. “I thought everything was fine. I trusted you. Then one day you said goodbye and walked out, not a word about why. Got married two weeks later. I had to hear it from my mother. ‘Did you know about this person?’ she asked me. ‘He must have been in the picture for quite some time,’ she told me. ‘Rebecca can’t have been dating him only two weeks, I shouldn’t think.’”

  As he spoke, he leaned toward her until he was hugging the table between his sprawling arms. It made Rebecca see, at long last, that this really was Will Allenby—a lanky, big-eared giraffe of a boy who never had quite learned how to manage his own limbs. Those were his startling eyes, whose clear blue light she only now detected underneath the shelter of his thatched brows. And his wide, sharp shoulders, and his boxy Adam’s apple bobbing in his neck. Looking at him was like looking at changeable taffeta—back and forth between the generic old man and the specific young Will. Which made it all the worse that he sounded so bitter.

  She said, “Will. I’m sorry. I know I didn’t treat you well. But it wasn’t anything I planned! I was just . . . overwhelmed! Swept off my feet by a fully grown man, someone who already had his life in order, was already living his life, while you and I were still . . . but I never meant to hurt you. I hope you can believe that.”

  The waiter said, “Is everything to your liking, folks?”

  “Yes, delicious,” Rebecca said. “Then afterwards,” she told Will, “after I was married and settled, I know I should have written or something. Offered more of an explanation. But everything started moving so fast! Everything was so chaotic! I had the three little girls to take care of and more and more of the business falling on my shoulders; I was living in that crowded house with my ailing mother-in-law and an uncle-in-law in mourning and a very adolescent brother-in-law; and then my own baby came along. There wasn’t a moment to think, even, let alone write you a letter! It seemed I got onto a whole different path, got farther and farther away from my original self. But just this summer I sort of . . . woke up. I looked around me; I said, Who have I turned into? What’s become of me? Why am I behaving like this? I’m an impostor in my own life! Or another way I could put it is, it’s not my own life. It’s somebody else’s. And that’s the reason I phoned you.”

  Will straightened slowly in his seat until he was upright again. He said, “I guess you thought you could waltz on back as if you’d never left.”

  “I didn’t think that!”

  “You thought I’d say, ‘Oh, sure, Rebecca, I forgive you. I’ve forgotten all about what you did. Let’s go back to the old days.’”

  “I never thought any such thing,” she said.

  But she had, in fact. Secretly, she had fantasized that he might say he’d never stopped loving her. Now that seemed conceited, and self-deluding, and shameful.

  She slid back her chair and stood up in a rush, bruising both of her thighs against the underside of the table. “Sorry,” she told him. “I can see this has been a mistake.”

  She collected her purse and walked out. He didn’t try to stop her.

  * * *

  All the way home she talked to herself, and shook her head, and blinked back angry tears. “How could I have been so stupid?” she asked. “So outspoken? So forward?” She turned the air-conditioning higher. Her face was filmed with a layer of sweat as slick and tight as shrink-wrap. “But why did he say he’d meet me, if that was the way he felt? Why did he phone me back, even? Oh,” she wailed, “and I should have paid half of the dinner check!” She risked a glance toward the rearview mirror. She decided that her two fans of hair made her look like a Texas longhorn.

  Baltimore was solid and familiar and reassuring, its buildings twinkling with safety lights. She rolled her window down and breathed in the sooty petroleum smell, which struck her as refreshing. And the windows of the Open Arms, when she pulled up, glowed so kindly. She parked and unfolded herself from the car. Her skirt was as wrinkled as wastepaper. The colors of her outfit—red, white, and blue, for Lord’s sake!—reminded her of that cheap disposable picnic ware intended for the Fourth of July.

  She climbed the front steps and unlocked the door. “I’m home!” she called.

  “Hah?” Poppy said from upstairs. She heard laughter on the TV—a sound that ordinarily grated against her nerves, but tonight she found it cozy.

  She went straight to the kitchen and set down her purse and looked for something to eat. Standing in front of the open fridge, she devoured two chicken legs, the last of a pasta salad, and several cherry tomatoes. She polished off a container of coleslaw and half a jar of crab-apple rings left over from Thanksgiving. She was so hungry she felt hollow. It seemed no amount of food could ever fill her.

  Six

  Early on the last Wednesday morning in August, Joey and Lateesha rang Rebecca’s doorbell. Lateesha was carrying the pink crib pillow she never sl
ept without, and both children wore knapsacks. Behind them stood Hakim—a considerable distance behind, all the way out on the curb, almost back in his car already. “I take Min Foo to the hospital!” he shouted. “The pains are five minutes apart!”

  “All right! Good luck!” Rebecca said, and she blew a kiss to Min Foo. “Just remind yourself, sweetheart, you’re going to get a baby out of this!”

  Min Foo said, “What? Well, yes. The kids haven’t had breakfast yet, Mom.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Rebecca promised, laying an arm around each child.

  As soon as the car had driven off, she led the children upstairs to the third-floor guest room. “Isn’t this exciting?” she asked as she helped Lateesha shuck her knapsack. “By lunchtime, I bet, you’ll have a brand-new brother or sister!”

  They didn’t seem all that thrilled. They had the bleary, befuddled look of sleepers awakened too suddenly, and they followed her back down to the kitchen in a shuffling silence. When she set out toast and jam, Lateesha’s eyes filled with tears. “The jam’s got dots!” she said. “It’s got dots that will stick in my teeth!”

  “Those are raspberry seeds, dummy,” Joey said.

  “Joey called me a dummy!”

  “Now, now,” Rebecca said. “Never mind; I’ll find you some nice grape jelly.”

  Then Poppy came down wanting his breakfast, and he needed the situation explained to him several times. “Min Foo’s having a baby? I thought she was divorced,” he said.

  “She was, Poppy, but then she married Hakim, remember?”

  “Hakim! Good glory, not another black man!”

  “No, Poppy, he’s Arab. What a way to talk,” Rebecca said, sending a glance toward Lateesha. But Lateesha was absorbed in spreading grape jelly precisely to the edges of her toast, and she seemed oblivious.

  After breakfast, Rebecca made up the two beds in the guest room and propped Lateesha’s pink pillow against one headboard. This had probably once been a servant’s room. It was small and stuffy, with an oppressively low ceiling and a single narrow window. In one corner stood a dark wooden bookcase crammed with curling paperbacks, faded textbooks from the girls’ school days, and the histories and biographies that Rebecca used to read in college. She used to get crushes, almost, on people like Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln. She would study them in depth, try to learn every detail of their lives in much the same way that her roommate studied the lives of movie stars.

  And she had once been so political! She had picketed the Macadam cafeteria on behalf of its underpaid workers; she had marched against the war in Vietnam; she had plastered the door of her dorm room with anti-nuclear stickers. Now she could barely bring herself to vote. All she read in the newspaper was Ann Landers and her horoscope. Her eyes slid over Kosovo and Rwanda and hurried on.

  It occurred to her that so far, the only step she’d taken toward retrieving that old Rebecca was to try and reconnect with the old Rebecca’s boyfriend. Like some fluff-headed girl from the fifties, she had assumed she would reach her goal by riding a man’s coattails.

  Just as well that she had failed, she told herself. (Although still, more than two weeks later, the memory of her dinner with Will continued to pinch her pride.)

  The telephone rang and she flew downstairs, calling, “Get that, somebody! Answer the phone!” because she thought it might be Hakim. But it was only the man from Second Eden, arranging to come replace the dead azaleas in the backyard. “Now, I don’t want to do it quite yet,” he said, “because it’s still kind of warm. Could turn downright hot again, even, and I always advise waiting till—”

  “My daughter’s having a baby; could you get off the line?” she said.

  “Oh! Sorry.”

  “Not that I mean to be rude,” she said, instantly feeling guilty. “It’s just, you know how it is when one of your children—”

  “Ma’am. Believe me. My daughter had twins. Me and my wife sat in that waiting room twenty-one hours.”

  “Twenty-one hours!”

  “The nurses kept saying, ‘You-all might want to go home and come back,’ but we said, ‘No, sir. No, indeed. No way, José. Not on your life,’ we said, and it got to be suppertime, got to be dark, got to be the next morning—”

  “I have to get off the line,” Rebecca told him. She hung up, and then felt guilty all over again.

  It seemed she always developed a stomachache when one of the girls was in labor. Unconsciously, she would spend the duration holding in her abdominal muscles. It made her wonder how the nurses in delivery rooms survived.

  As luck would have it, no party had been scheduled for that evening. The Open Arms was going through a slow spell. But to keep the children amused, she hauled out all the candleholders and set them on the dining-room table. Then she unloaded a mammoth shopping bag of fresh candles. “Put in any color you like,” she said. “After that you can light them for a minute, just so they’ll lose that new look. Only while I’m in the room, though; you understand?”

  She watched Joey choose a taper striped red and white like a barber pole—a bit Christmassy, but never mind. She said, “Now that fall’s on the way, we can start using candles at parties again. I always hate to give them up over the summer, but it’s true they have a sort of warming effect psychologically, even if they don’t produce that much actual heat.”

  The telephone in the kitchen bleeped once and fell silent. Rebecca paused for several seconds, but no rings followed.

  “When I was a little girl,” she went on, “my Aunt Ida gave me this beautiful, tall white candle with a kind of frill of white lace running up it in a spiral. I thought it was the most elegant thing I’d ever seen in my life. I saved it in my bureau drawer for some momentous event, although I can’t imagine now what that would have been. I mean, I was only eight years old. Not a whole lot of momentous events happen when you’re eight. And Aunt Ida would ask me, now and then, ‘Have you ever burned that candle?’ I’d say, ‘No, not yet. I’m saving it,’ I’d say. Then one day, oh, maybe three or four years later, I came across it in my drawer. It had turned all yellow and warped; it was practically a C shape, and the lace was coming off in crumbles. I’d never seen it burning, and now I never would. So ever since that time, I light my candles any chance I get. I light them by the dozens, all over every room, at every party from September through May. Multitudes of candles.”

  She handed each child a box of matches, and they started lighting the candles that marched the length of the table—tapers and pillars and votive lights, white and colored and striped and gilded, blazing in the dim room like a skyful of stars.

  * * *

  It was after one o’clock when Hakim finally called. “I have a son!” he said. “He is huge: eight pounds ten ounces. Is looking just like me. Min Foo is feeling fine and sending all her love.”

  “What’s his name?” Rebecca asked.

  “We have no name. NoNo said that it would only be a girl.”

  “Oh. Right,” Rebecca said.

  She let the children telephone their aunts and all their friends to spread the news, and after that she hauled out her decorating supplies and the three of them made a poster reading WELCOME HOME, MOM AND LITTLE BROTHER. Then Poppy came down from his nap and they all drank a ginger-ale toast in Mother Davitch’s sherbet glasses. Poppy seemed to have the impression that the baby was Rebecca’s, but he got that straightened out in due course.

  When Hakim called again, in the late afternoon, Rebecca drove the children to the hospital for a visit. “You two are lucky,” she told them on the way. “It used to be they wouldn’t let children visit before they were twelve. Your aunts didn’t see your mother till I brought her home from the hospital.”

  Hard to believe that had been thirty-two years ago. To Rebecca, it seemed as vivid as last week: the nearly imperceptible weight of that tiny body, the warmth of that downy head nestling in the crook of her neck as she climbed the front steps, and the three little girls in the doorway, goggle-eyed and awed, reachi
ng out reverently to touch the baby’s foot.

  When she was handed her new grandson in the hospital room—another modern development, no plate-glass window between them—she had a moment of confusion where it seemed he was Min Foo. He had Min Foo’s paintbrush hair and caraway-seed eyes, and he peered curiously up at Rebecca as if he thought he might know her from somewhere. “Look,” she told the children. “He’s saying, ‘Who are you? What kind of people have I ended up with, here? How am I going to like living on this planet?’”

  She hoped they didn’t notice the ridiculous break in her voice.

  * * *

  When they got home again, bringing carry-out chicken and French fries for supper, they found Poppy playing solitaire on the coffee table in the front parlor. “I couldn’t stand it up in the family room,” he told them, “because that telephone kept ringing, ringing, ringing. Durn thing nearly rang my ear off.”

  “Did you answer it?” Rebecca asked.

  “No,” he said, “I let them leave a message. Yammer, yammer away on that benighted machine of yours.”

  But when she went upstairs to check, she found only three messages. “Well, this here’s Alice Farmer,” was the first. “I know you don’t plan on no parties this weekend but I want to come in anyhow because I need the money. My brother’s girl Berenice is turning twenty. You remember Berenice, who’s afflicted with eating disorder . . .” Then she sort of wandered off, still talking but growing fainter.

  The second message was a long pause and a click.

  The third, recorded one minute after the second, was, “Rebecca, um, it’s Will.”

  She drew back sharply.

  “I was just afraid you might have gotten the wrong idea,” he said. “I don’t know why you felt you had to rush off like that. You didn’t even eat your salmon! The waiter asked if anything was wrong. I’m afraid you might have misunderstood me. Could you please call me back, please?”

  She frowned at the machine for a moment. Then she pressed the Delete button.