Back When We Were Grownups Read online

  * * *

  Thursday morning she took the children to the zoo, where they spent some time commiserating with the dusty, panting lions. From there they went to the hospital. The baby was off getting circumcised, with Hakim (a cardiologist) watching from the sidelines and no doubt wringing his hands, and Min Foo was sitting up in bed doing a crossword puzzle; so Rebecca took a short walk in order to give the children a private visit with their mother. She stopped at the nursery window, where rows of infants lay in their cots like little wrapped burritos, and then she went back to the room. The baby had returned in a state of outrage and was being soothed and cooed over. Lateesha was sucking her thumb, which she hadn’t done in some time. Rebecca suggested to the children that they go home and have a picnic lunch in the backyard.

  In the afternoon LaVon came by, Lateesha’s father, and carried the children off to watch his jazz band practice. (He was actually a fourth-grade teacher, but he had hopes of someday becoming a professional musician.) When he brought them back he stayed for Thursday-night supper; so Rebecca thought of his appearance as sort of a mixed blessing. Not that she wasn’t pleased to see him. He was a funny, charming, high-spirited young man, inclined toward African-print shirts and wild hairdos, so full of energy that he all but danced even when he was standing still. But Hakim was at supper too, and he tended to act somewhat bristly around his predecessor. Also, Min Foo would hear about this and throw a fit. “Why are you so nice to LaVon?” she’d be bound to ask. “Don’t you understand that he’s out of the picture now?” To which Rebecca would answer, “I can’t turn my feelings off like a faucet, honey, every time you choose to dump another husband.”

  Although she did turn her feelings on, in a way, because she had always sworn that she would welcome newcomers to the family. She had promised herself that, Aunt Ida–like, she would declare her door to be permanently ajar, and she had kept her promise so faithfully that now she couldn’t say for certain whether she truly loved her sons-in-law or merely thought she did.

  Anyhow, what difference did it make? They were good husbands, all of them—including Troy, the non-husband. Good husbands and good fathers. (Well, maybe except for Joey’s father, the antique Professor Drake, who had moved to some Greek island after his banishment and ceased all communication.) She smiled now to see how comfortably LaVon tipped back in his chair as he argued some musical issue with Troy, who taught theory at the Peabody Conservatory. Poppy was interrupting to say that nothing remotely worth listening to had been written after 1820. “My favorite composer is Haydn,” he said. “It’s true I used to think he was sort of music-boxy, but that was before I went to a concert and heard him play in person.”

  “In . . . what?” LaVon asked, not having been exposed lately to Poppy and his lapses.

  Rebecca hastened to tinkle a fork against her iced-tea glass. “Okay, everybody!” she said. “Time to propose a toast to Abdul!”

  That was the name the parents had finally chosen for the new baby: Abdul Abdulazim. Rebecca liked pronouncing it. “To Abdul Abdulazim!” she said now. “His arrival makes us beam.” Abdul’s father, Hakim Abdulazim (whose name was even more fun to pronounce) sat up straighter and raised his chin proudly. “It’s such a pleasure to have a new boy,” Rebecca chanted, “Let’s hope he’s as nice as Lateesha and Joey!”

  Hakim lifted his glass, and so did the two children, but the others just murmured, “Cheers,” and went on with their conversations. They heard so many toasts, after all. Rebecca could sympathize. It seemed she was constantly mustering enthusiasm for her family’s engagements and weddings and births, their children’s straight A’s and starring roles and graduations. Sometimes, for lack of any other reason, she proposed a toast to Thursday. “To Thursday once again, and so many of us together! To good food and good talk, and lovely summer weather!” (Or spring weather, or fall, or winter weather.) And that was not even counting all those professional events—her clients’ Christmases and New Years, their business promotions and mergers and retirements, their everlasting anniversaries and confirmations and bar mitzvahs and bridal showers.

  Well. She squared her shoulders and turned to Hakim. “Now, about the baby-welcoming,” she said.

  He looked worried. “This is what?” he asked.

  “The party we give our new babies. It’s kind of a Davitch tradition,” she told him. “The idea came from one time when I was waiting for one of the girls at the airport and I saw this huge, happy, noisy crowd carrying balloons and placards and video cameras and regular cameras and flowers and wrapped gifts, and then the plane landed and a woman walked in with a tiny little button of a baby, Korean I think or Chinese, and the crowd started cheering and this couple stepped forward and the wife held out her arms and the woman gave her the baby and . . . I’ve always felt sort of cheated that we haven’t had any adoptions in our family. Adoption is more sudden than pregnancy, don’t you think? It’s more dramatic. So I said, ‘Why don’t we welcome our babies like that?’ And that’s what we’ve done ever since.”

  Hakim blinked. Rebecca wondered, sometimes, exactly how good his English was. “Well, anyhow,” she said, “all I need from you two is a date. We can do it this weekend, if you like. The Open Arms isn’t booked. Or would you prefer just a Thursday? A normal family Thursday?”

  “I will ask Min Foo,” he said. But he still looked worried.

  It wasn’t a huge gathering tonight—just nine around the table. As usual, Troy and Biddy and Zeb were present—Biddy because she used Thursdays to experiment with new recipes, and Zeb because (Rebecca suspected) this was his only chance for a home-cooked meal. He would go home laden down with leftovers, she always made certain. It used to be that NoNo had been a regular too, but since the wedding they’d hardly seen her. Well, that was as it should be, of course. She was establishing her own traditions now.

  Last week, NoNo had phoned Rebecca and asked how people formed car pools. Peter’s school was due to reopen and she would be in charge of his transportation. “Do I put an ad in the paper?” she’d asked. “Tack a note to a bulletin board? Or what?”

  “You get hold of the school directory . . .” Rebecca began. She spoke slowly; she was trying to cast her mind back. “You look up all the students who live near you . . .”

  “I asked Peter who lived near us and he said he didn’t think anyone. But I’m not sure he knows. It doesn’t seem to me that he has any friends.”

  “None at all?” Rebecca said.

  “Well, he never gets any phone calls, at least.”

  “Maybe boys just don’t phone,” Rebecca told her.

  “Oh, you’re right; maybe they don’t.”

  “It’s not as if you or I have had much experience with boys.”

  “You’re right,” NoNo said again, and her voice turned thin and quavery. “I’m really not equipped for this, you know?”

  “Oh, sweetheart, you’ll do fine,” Rebecca had said. “Don’t worry for an instant. Just call Patch or Min Foo and ask them about car pools, why don’t you.”

  Now she leaned across the table to Joey. “Joey,” she said, “do you ever talk on the phone?”

  “I talk with you, Gram.”

  “With your friends, I mean. Do you ever get on the phone and talk with them in the evening?”

  “Well, sure, if I need to know about a homework assignment or something.”

  “But not just to talk for no reason.”

  “No reason! Then why would I call?”

  “Aha,” Rebecca said. She told Zeb, “NoNo thinks Peter doesn’t have any friends because nobody ever phones him.”

  “He’ll be okay. Just give him time,” Zeb said. Which was probably what he told every parent who walked into his office, Rebecca reflected. He was helping Lateesha cut her pork chop, and he didn’t even look up as he spoke.

  “This spinach dish—” Biddy was announcing. “Could I have people’s attention, please? This spinach dish contains a tiny bit of nutmeg, but the point is that you’re not supp
osed to taste it. It’s only meant to enhance the flavor of the spinach. Does anyone taste any nutmeg?”

  Hard to tell, for as usual, the others were too busy arguing and interrupting each other. “I think it’s delicious,” Rebecca told her.

  But Biddy said, “I don’t know why I bother making the effort,” just as if no one had spoken. She snatched up the spinach dish and marched back to the kitchen.

  Rebecca looked down at her plate for a second, and when she looked up again she found Zeb watching her. He said, “It’s just that you always say things are delicious. She didn’t mean any harm.”

  “Well, I know that,” Rebecca said.

  Then she said, “More pork chops, anyone? Who’d like another pork chop?” and the moment passed.

  * * *

  On Friday Min Foo and the baby went home, and Rebecca dropped the two children off along with a bag of groceries. From there she drove directly to a bookstore. “Do you have any books on Robert E. Lee?” she asked a salesclerk.

  “Try Biography, over by the window.”

  “Thank you.”

  She crossed the store, pausing once or twice when something in another section caught her eye—a children’s book on ballet, which was Merrie’s current passion, and a collection of Holy Land photos that would make a very good birthday present for Alice Farmer. In Biography she found three books about Lee, one of them a paperback. She plucked that from the shelf and studied the portrait on the cover: Lee’s square-cut beard and disappointed gaze. He wasn’t someone she particularly admired. It was only that he represented the first and last extensive scholarly research she had ever undertaken. She had barely assembled her reference materials, was just starting to feel caught up in the project, when Joe Davitch walked into her life. Now the sight of Lee’s face brought back a swarm of memories: the musty smell of the Macadam College library; the sweetly rounded o’s of her history professor, who came from Minnesota; and the thrilling crispness of brand-new textbooks and spiral-bound notebooks purchased from the school store.

  A couple of feet away, a severe-looking woman with a tight bun of white hair selected a hardback and showed it to a girl in a miniskirt—her granddaughter, most likely. “Now, this would be a good choice,” she said. “The life of Charles Lindbergh.”

  “But it’s, like, humongous,” the granddaughter said. “I’d totally never finish it before the start of classes.”

  The woman somehow managed to grow taller as she stood there. “May I inquire,” she said icily, “what kind of voice that is you’re using?”

  Rebecca knew exactly what kind of voice it was. She’d heard Dixon call it a surfer-girl voice. (Though why it should be needed in Baltimore, Maryland, and how that shallow, breathy tone could be advantageous—did it carry more easily over the sound of the waves, or what?—she couldn’t say.) But the granddaughter didn’t seem to have heard. “And besides,” she went on, “he’s, like, a guy. Guys’ biographies suck.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the woman said, growing even taller.

  “Well. Sorry, Grandma,” the girl said meekly.

  The woman sniffed and replaced the book on the shelf.

  Rebecca was impressed. Imagine having such authority! She herself might have drifted into a string of likes and totallys right along with the granddaughter, hardly noticing what she was doing. She had no sense of definition, was the problem. No wonder she’d ended up a whole different person!

  She bought not only the Lee paperback but the two hardbacks as well, although she couldn’t afford them. When she set them on the counter, the salesclerk asked, “Will that be all?” and Rebecca said, “Yes. It will,” in a firm, declarative manner that (she realized too late) exactly duplicated the white-haired woman’s.

  * * *

  Some days were telephone days and other days were not. Did it work that way for everyone? Some days Rebecca’s phone rang nonstop, one caller tumbling over the heels of another, and other days you wouldn’t know she owned a phone.

  On this particular afternoon the painter called; then the dentist’s office; then the man who inspected the furnace. Poppy’s physical therapist wanted to reschedule. Patch wanted to complain about Jeep. Min Foo wanted to list possible dates for the baby-welcoming.

  A Mrs. Allen called to arrange for her husband’s fiftieth-birthday party. “This would be, oh, maybe sixty guests,” she said. “Or sixty-five. Let’s play it safe and say seventy.”

  Rebecca wondered why people couldn’t figure these things out before they got on the line. But she said, “Seventy. All right.”

  “It’s going to be a surprise.”

  “Really,” Rebecca said.

  She should have let that go, but in all good conscience, she couldn’t. “If you want my honest opinion,” she said, “surprise parties are guaranteed disasters. Is what I would call them.”

  This made the plumber, flat on his back beneath the kitchen sink, snort and mutter, “Amen to that!” But Mrs. Allen was undeterred. “I’m thinking just drinks and canapés,” she went on blithely. “Sit-down dinners are so stuffy, don’t you agree?”

  The Open Arms could not have managed a sit-down dinner for seventy; so Rebecca certainly did agree. They settled on the date and the deposit fee, after which she prepared to say goodbye, but Mrs. Allen moved on next to the subject of her husband’s midlife crisis. (His decision to try a hair transplant, his drastic weight-loss diet, his purchase of a sixteen-hundred-dollar set of golf clubs although that was cheaper, she supposed, than taking up with some dolly half his age.) Rebecca tiptoed across the kitchen, stretching the telephone cord to its limit, and turned the timer dial on the stove till it started dinging. “Oops! Gotta go!” she cried, and she hung up. “Some people think the phone is some kind of . . . hobby,” she told the plumber.

  He said, “You ought to check out my house. You know my daughter? Felicia?” Then the phone rang again.

  Rebecca sighed and reached for the receiver. “Hello,” she said.

  Will Allenby said, “Rebecca?”

  She said, “Oh.”

  “Don’t hang up!”

  “I wasn’t going to hang up,” she told him.

  Although a part of her would have liked to. It was only curiosity that stopped her.

  He said, “I just wanted to apologize for the other evening.”

  “That’s quite all right,” she said stiffly.

  “I never meant for the conversation to go that way, believe me. I don’t know how it happened.”

  The odd thing was, the apology made her feel humiliated all over again. But she said, “Really, don’t give it a thought. I’ve forgotten it completely. Thanks for calling, though.”

  “Wait!”

  She waited.

  “Please,” he said. “Could we just talk a little bit? Could you just listen?”

  “Well,” she said, “all right. I guess so.”

  “I seem to be in . . . something of a sorry state, Rebecca. Lately it’s been all I can do just to get up in the morning. I get up; I look in the mirror; I think, Oh, God, it’s the same old, same old me, and I want to crawl back into bed and stay there forever.”

  Rebecca held very still, as if he could observe how attentively she was listening.

  He said, “The fact of the matter is, the divorce was my wife’s idea, not mine. I’m not even sure what went wrong there! One day she just announced that she wanted me to move out. And of course she kept our daughter with her. I can understand that; what do I know about teenaged girls? But we both agreed that I’d still have lots of contact. I would see my daughter regularly, any day I liked, back and forth between our two places. Now whenever I phone, though, Beatrice is busy. I ask her to come for supper and she says she’s got a friend over, or she’s made other plans. She never has any time to get together.”

  “Well, she’s seventeen!” Rebecca said. “Of course she doesn’t have time.”

  “I tell her to bring the friend along and she says her friend wouldn’t feel comfortable in
my apartment.”

  “You know how teenagers are. They’re constitutionally ashamed of their parents. It isn’t personal.”

  “No,” Will said, “there’s more to it than that. I can’t explain it. It seems I’m just . . . destined not to have anyone in my life. Here I am, all alone in this old lady’s dead-quiet house, and it feels so natural; that’s the worst of it. It feels like my natural state. What did you expect? I ask myself. Did you imagine someone would actually want to stay with you forever? You should thank your lucky stars you ever got married at all. It’s as if I’m lacking some talent that everyone else takes for granted.”

  “Now, Will, you’re just plain wrong about that,” Rebecca said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Then tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me why you broke up with me.”

  “We’ve been through that! When Joe Davitch came along—”

  “No, I want the real reason. I want you to be honest.”

  “I am being honest!” she said.

  “Don’t insult my intelligence, Rebecca.”

  She felt stung. She said, “I can see this is going nowhere; so I’m going to hang up now. Goodbye.”

  And without waiting for his answer, she put the receiver back on the hook.

  The plumber was packing his tools away more noisily than seemed necessary, with lots of clanks and rattles and many exaggerated grunts as he reached for various wrenches. She suspected he felt embarrassed for her. “What a nuisance!” she said gaily. “These people who stay on the phone forever; I just never know how to get off, do you?”

  The plumber said, “Sort of persistent type, was he?”

  Then he cocked his head at her and waited, looking expectant, but Rebecca just said, “Right,” and asked if he’d fixed the leak.

  She wished she hadn’t ended the call so abruptly. She was beginning to get that awful torn feeling she always had after saying something hurtful to somebody.

  For the rest of the afternoon the telephone was silent, but at suppertime, there was the usual flurry of telemarketers. Also another call from the Second Eden man. “Those azaleas I told you we had, they’re a teensy bit off from the color I said. They’re more like a, what would you say, not a pink, not a red, not orange—”