Ladder of Years Read online

Delia hadn’t mentioned him to Belle because working for him would mean moving out of this house, and how could she ever do that? This house was perfect. Even Mr. Pomfret had his good points. Somehow the visit to Santa had shown her that. So she nonchalantly accepted the number Belle had scrawled on the corner of a takeout menu. Might as well get this over with. She perched on one arm of the couch and reached for the phone and dialed. Meanwhile Belle hovered in the background, supposedly absorbed with the cat. “Is you a nice little kitty. Is you a sweet little kitty,” she crooned. Delia listened to the ringing at the other end of the line, letting her eyes travel gratefully over the blank white walls and bare floorboards.

  “Hello?” Noah said.

  She said, “This is Delia Grinstead.”

  “Oh, hi! I’m supposed to tell you I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? For what?”

  “Dad says a guy shouldn’t talk about seagull do in front of ladies.”

  “Oh. Well—”

  A man said something in the background.

  “Women,” Noah said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “‘Women,’ I meant to say, not ‘ladies.’”

  All pretext, of course. Mr. Miller surely didn’t think she would be offended by seagull do. Or the word “ladies.” This was mere strategy. But Noah himself probably had no inkling of that, and so Delia told him, “It’s quite all right.”

  “Kenny Moss’s uncle drives a snack truck; that’s how Kenny knows about the you-know-what. But Dad claims his uncle was teasing him. Dad goes, ‘Right, the corn-chip factory really does take the time to send their workers out to the beach with shovels.’”

  Another mutter in the background.

  “Okay, ‘said.’ He said,” Noah told Delia. “And on top of that he said”—heavy stress, meaningful pause—“he said how come it’s not in the list of ingredients, if they use seagull do? Oops.”

  “Oh, you know those lists,” Delia told him. “All those scientific terms. They can cover up just about anything with some chemical-sounding name.”

  “They can?”

  “Why, sure! They probably call it ‘dihydroxyexymexylene’ or some such.”

  Noah giggled. “Hey, Dad,” he said, his voice retreating slightly. “Delia says it probably is on the list; it’s probably dihydroxy …”

  Belle had carried the cat over to the window now. She was holding him up to the glass, which was nearly opaque with dust. And cobwebs clouded the tops of the curtains, and the philodendron plant on the sill was leggy and bedraggled. The whole room seemed drained of color, as if, already, it had slipped into the dimmest reaches of Delia’s memory.

  12

  Mr. Pomfret said, “Moving on, eh,” without so much as a change of expression. (You would think she was a piece of office equipment.) All he asked, he said, was that she finish out the week—tie up any dangling odds and ends. Which of course she agreed to do, even though there were no odds and ends; just the usual busywork of rat-a-tat letters and robot phone calls and Mr. Pomfret’s daily sheaf of marked catalogs.

  It seemed he urgently required a pair of perforated leather driving gloves. A radio antenna the size and shape of a breakfast plate. A solid-walnut display rack for souvenir golf balls.

  When she turned in her office key on Friday afternoon, he told her he might wait till after New Year’s to replace her. “This time,” he said, “I believe I’ll hire a word processor, assuming I can find one.”

  Delia was confused, for an instant. She pictured hiring a machine. Just try asking a machine to debate his glove size with an 800 operator! she thought. Then she realized her mistake. But still, somehow, she felt hurt, and she shouldered her bag abruptly and left without saying goodbye.

  ———

  All she owned fit easily in a cardboard carton begged from Rick-Rack’s. The goosenecked lamp poked its head out, though. She could have left it that way (Belle was giving her a ride), but she liked the notion of a life no larger than a single, compact box; and so she shifted things until the flaps closed securely. Then she took her coat and handbag from the bed, and she picked the carton up and walked out.

  No point sending one last look backward. She knew every detail of that room by heart—every nail hole, every seam in the wallpaper, and the way the paw-footed radiator, in the furry half-light of this overcast Saturday morning, resembled some skeletal animal sitting on its haunches.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she set down her load and put her coat on. She could hear Belle talking to George in the kitchen. He was staying here another week or two, just till Delia was settled. It was Delia’s belief that she had to let her own smell permeate the new place first; otherwise he’d keep running back to the old place.

  Mr. Miller had told her George was more than welcome. He’d been meaning to buy a cat anyhow, he said. (But notice how he’d used the word “buy,” apparently unaware that true animal lovers would not be caught dead in a pet shop.)

  Still buttoning her coat, she walked through the dining room to knock on the kitchen door. “Coming,” Belle called. Delia returned to the hall. Upstairs, Mr. Lamb was creaking the floorboards, and his TV had started its level, fluent murmur. She wondered when he would get around to noticing she was gone. Maybe never, she thought.

  It was still not too late to change her mind.

  “I gave George a can of tuna,” Belle said when she emerged. “That ought to keep him occupied.”

  “Oh, Belle, you’ll spoil him.”

  “Nothing’s too good for my whiskums! I’m hoping he’ll refuse to leave me when it’s time. ‘No, no, Mommy!’” she squeaked. “‘I want to stay here with Aunt Belle!’”

  Meanwhile she was flouncing into her winged coat, fluffing her curls, jingling her car keys. “All set?” she asked.

  “All set.”

  They walked out to her enormous old Ford. Delia fitted her carton among a tangle of real estate signs in the trunk, and then the two of them got in the car and Belle started the engine. With the seat-belt alarm insistently dinging, they pulled away from the curb.

  It was months since Delia had ridden in a car. The scenery glided past so quickly, and so smoothly! She gripped her door handle as they swung around the corner, and then zip! zip! zip! went the dentist, the dime store, the Potpourri Palace. In no time, they were turning onto Pendle Street and parking in the Millers’ gravel driveway—a trip that had taken her at least ten minutes, walking.

  “My parents live in a house like this,” Belle said. She was peering through the windshield at the cut-out designs of covered wagons on the shutters. “In a suburb of York, P.A. Dee, are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Oh, yes,” Delia said weakly.

  “You’ll be nothing but a servant!”

  “It’s better than being a typewriter,” Delia told her.

  “Well, if you’re going to put it that way.”

  Delia climbed out of the car, and Belle came around to help her maneuver her box from the trunk. “Thanks,” Delia said. “You have my phone number.”

  “I have it.”

  “I’ll let you know when’s a good time to bring the cat.”

  “Or before then,” Belle said. “Or supposing you want to move back! I’ll wait a few days before I try renting your room.”

  They might have gone on this way forever, but at that moment Noah burst out the front door. “Delia! Hi!” he called.

  “Ms. Grinstead to you,” Belle muttered under her breath. She told Delia, “Don’t you let them treat you like a peon.”

  Delia just hugged her and turned toward the house. How the Millers treated her was the least of her concerns, she thought. The question was how to treat them—what distance to maintain from this mop-headed, blue-jeaned boy. It was so easy to fall back into being someone’s mother! She smiled at him as he lifted the carton from her arms. “I can manage that,” she said.

  “I’m supposed to carry your luggage. Dad told me. Don’t you have anything more?” he asked. Belle was already backin
g the car out of the driveway.

  “This is it,” Delia said.

  “Dad’s over at the school, so I’m supposed to show you where everything is. We’ve got your room all made up for you. We changed the bedsheets even though they were clean.”

  “Oh, then why did you change them?”

  “Dad said if they didn’t still have their laundry smell you might think someone else had slept in them.”

  “I wouldn’t think that,” she assured him.

  They walked through the living room, where the cushions lined the couch in last week’s exact formation and the magazines had not varied their positions by an inch. The carpet in the hall was freshly vacuumed, though. She could see the roller marks in the nap. And when they entered the guest room, Noah placed her box on a folding luggage stand that had definitely not been there earlier. “It’s new,” he said, noticing her glance. “We bought it at Home ‘n’ Hearth.”

  “It’s very nice.”

  “And lookit here,” he said. On the bureau sat a tiny television set. “Color TV! From Lawson Appliance. Dad says a live-in woman always has her own TV.”

  “Oh, I don’t need a—”

  “Clock radio,” Noah said, “decorator box of Kleenex …”

  What touched her most, though, was how they’d turned the bedcovers down—that effortful white triangle. She said, “You shouldn’t have.” And she meant it, for the sight made her feel indebted, somehow.

  She followed Noah to the closet, where he was displaying the hangers. “Three dozen matching hangers, solid plastic, pink. Not a wire one in the bunch. We had our choice between pink or white or brown.”

  “Pink is perfect,” she told him.

  Three dozen! It would disappoint them to find out how few clothes she owned.

  “Now I’m supposed to leave you in private,” Noah said. “But I’ll be in my room if there’s anything you need.”

  “Thank you, Noah.”

  “You know where my room is?”

  “I can find it.”

  “And you’re supposed to unpack and put your stuff in drawers and all.”

  “I’ll do that,” she promised.

  As he left he glanced back at her doubtfully, as if he worried she wouldn’t follow instructions.

  Her carton looked so shabby, resting on the needlepoint webbing of the luggage stand. She walked over to it and lifted the flaps, and out floated the lonesome, stale, hornet’s-nest smell of the room on George Street. Well. She took off her coat, hung it on one of the hangers. Draped her purse strap over a hook. Drew the goosenecked lamp from the box but then had nowhere to put it, for the room already contained two lamps, shaded in rigid white satin. Still holding the goosenecked lamp (with its helmet of army-green metal and the dent at its base from when the cat had knocked it over one night), she sat down limply on the edge of the bed. She had to brace her feet so as not to slide off the slick coverlet. It was one of those hotel-type beds that seem at once too springy and too hard, and she couldn’t imagine getting used to it.

  Elsewhere in the house she heard a door open, a set of heavy footsteps, a man’s voice calling and Noah answering. She would have to rearrange her face and go join them. Any minute now, she would. But for a while she went on sitting there, clutching her homely little lamp and gathering courage.

  At the rear of the house, divided from the kitchen by only a counter, lay what the Millers called the family room. Here the stuffy decorating style relaxed into something more casual. A long, low couch faced a TV, an office desk stood against one wall, and three armchairs were grouped in a corner. It was this room that became, within the next few days, Delia’s territory. (She had always wanted a more modern house, without cubbies or nooks or crannies.) In the mornings, when she was through cleaning, she sat at the desk to write her grocery list. She went out for several hours then—usually on foot, even though she had a car at her disposal—but afternoons would find her puttering between family room and kitchen while Noah did his homework on the couch. Evenings, she read in one of the armchairs while Noah watched TV. Sometimes Mr. Miller watched too—or Joel, as she had to remind herself to call him—in which case she retired early with her book. She was a little shy with Mr. Miller: Joel. This was such an awkward situation, businesslike and yet at the same time necessarily intimate. But usually he had meetings to go to, or he spent the evening at his workbench in the garage. She suspected he felt the awkwardness too. He couldn’t possibly have stayed away so much before she came here.

  They liked plain food, plainly prepared—roast beef and broiled chicken and burgers. Noah hated vegetables but was required to eat one spoonful each night. Mr. Miller was probably no fonder of them, but he worked his way conscientiously through everything, and he always told her, “Dinner is delicious, Delia.” She suspected he would have said that no matter what she served. He asked her several courteous questions at every meal (had her day gone well? was she finding what she needed?), but she sensed he didn’t listen to her answers. This was a sad, sad man underneath, and sometimes even when his own son spoke there was a moment of silence before he pulled himself together to reply.

  “Guess what!” Noah might say. “Kenny Moss just got a humongous golden retriever. Dad, can we get a golden retriever?”.

  Long pause. Clinking of china. Then finally: “There is no such word as ‘humongous.’”

  “Sure there is, or how come I just used it?”

  And the two of them would be off on one of their arguments. Delia had never known anyone as particular about words as Joel Miller. He despised all terms that were trendy (including “trendy” itself). He refused to agree that something was “neat” unless it was, literally, tidy. He interrupted one of Noah’s most animated stories with the observation that no one could be “into” mountain climbing. But he always spoke with good humor, which probably explained why Noah still ventured to open his mouth.

  Fastened to Delia’s bathroom door was a full-length mirror, the first she had faced in six months, outside of a changing booth; and she was startled to see how thin she had grown. Her hipbones were sharp little chips, and the tops of her dresses looked hollow. So she served herself large helpings at these suppers, and she breakfasted with Noah every morning, and she walked to Rick-Rack’s each noon to dine on something hefty—even crab cakes, for she was making good money now and had nothing else to spend it on.

  Rick also served pork barbecue, the vinegary kind she was partial to, as it turned out. “You know,” she told him, “I never had much of a chance to try a real meal here. I knew you were a good cook, but I didn’t know how good.”

  “And here you been taking your Sunday dinners at that la-di-da Bay Arms!” he said.

  Was there anything about her this whole town didn’t know?

  After lunch, she crossed the street to pay a visit to George. He was in a snit with her for leaving. He showed up as soon as she let herself in but then turned his back pointedly and stalked off. “George?” she wheedled. No response. He marched into Belle’s living room and vanished. Delia waited in the hall, and a moment later a telltale sprig of whiskers poked around the edge of the door. A nose, an ear, an accusing green eye. “Georgie-boy!” she said. He sidled out, dusting the door with his fur and seeming to hang back even as he drew close enough to let her pat him.

  Why couldn’t Delia’s children miss her this much?

  All around town the streets were festooned with bristly silver ropes and honeycombed red tissue bells. There was a wreath above Mrs. Lincoln’s desk in the library. Vanessa had tied a red bow to Greggie’s stroller.

  The thought of spending Christmas with the Millers—poor Noah bearing the full weight of it—filled Delia with dread. But maybe they didn’t celebrate Christmas. Maybe they were Jewish, or some kind of fundamentalists who frowned on pagan ritual. It was true that so far, with just a week remaining, they hadn’t given a sign they knew what season this was.

  Delia went out to the garage to talk to Mr. Miller. “Um, Joel?” she
said.

  He was measuring a board at his workbench, wearing a raveled black sweater and frayed corduroys. Delia waited for him to look up—it took a minute—and then she said, “I wanted to ask about Christmas.”

  “Christmas,” he said. He reeled in his measuring tape.

  “Do you observe it?”

  “Well, yes. Normally,” he said.

  By “normally,” he must mean when he still had his wife. This would be their first Christmas without her, after all. Delia watched the thought travel across his face, deepening the lines at either side of his mouth. But he said, “Let’s see. Ah, you would get the day off, of course. Noah will be at his mother’s, and some friends in Wilmington have been asking me to visit. School is closed through New Year’s, so if you need more time in Baltimore—”

  “I won’t be going to Baltimore.”

  He stopped speaking.

  “I just wondered how you celebrate,” she told him. “Do you put up a tree? Should I take Noah shopping for gifts?”

  “Gifts.”

  “Something for his mother, maybe?”

  “Oh, God,” he said, and he sank onto the high stool behind him. He clamped the top of his head with one large hand—his usual sign of distress. “Yes, certainly for his mother, and also for Nat, Ellie’s father. He and Noah are pretty close. And for me, I guess; aren’t we supposed to encourage that? And I should get something for him. Oh, God Almighty.”

  “I’ll take him tomorrow,” she said. She hadn’t intended to plunge the man into despair.

  “That’s a Saturday. Your weekend.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Seated on the stool, Mr. Miller was closer to Delia’s eye level. He looked across at her for a moment. He said, “Don’t you have any family around? For weekend visits and such?”

  “No.”

  It was a mark of his isolation, she thought, that he had apparently not heard so much as a whisper about her past. For all he knew, Delia had dropped from the sky. Clearly he would have liked to ask more, but in the end he just said, “Well, thanks, Delia. As far as a tree goes, I figure since Noah won’t be here for the day itself, we don’t need to bother.”