Back When We Were Grownups Read online

  Rebecca, who had been listening more closely than she would admit, felt a stab of pity. Will could never have held his own against that kind of woman! But she just said, “Well, that’s all water over the bridge now.”

  “Dam,” her mother said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Water over the dam.”

  “Whatever.”

  “The ceremony was Catholic, or maybe just High Episcopal. This cousin wasn’t quite sure. She said there was a lot of kneeling going on. When Will was defining what a homophone was, he used feted and fetid as his examples.”

  Rebecca said, “He used what?”

  “F-E-T-E-D and F-E-T-I-D. That was the comment that struck his ex-wife-to-be as professor-sounding.”

  “Why was he defining a homophone at his wedding?” Rebecca asked.

  “Oh, you know how these subjects come up . . . I really couldn’t say.”

  “Well, anyhow—”

  “Also liken and lichen.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “L-I-K-E-N and L-I-C-H-E-N.”

  “What on earth?”

  But then her mother asked when Rebecca planned to bring Will for a visit—a prospect that seemed filled with possibilities for disaster—and Rebecca shifted her focus to inventing reasons not to.

  After she had hung up, though, she started picturing Will at his wedding. She saw his fine-boned, serious face surrounded by laughing young guests, and she felt such a deep sense of injury on his behalf that it was almost physical.

  Yesterday afternoon, he had come over to watch a movie with her—something subtitled, black-and-white, very difficult to follow, that she had driven all the way to Video Americain to rent. And Zeb had stopped by, as often happened on Sundays, and he and Poppy got to reminiscing about old times at the Open Arms. Zeb, in particular, could pull out any number of horror tales. The wedding ceremony where Mother Davitch started sobbing and couldn’t stop, the Easter morning when Joe hid six dozen raw eggs that he thought were cooked, the after-prom breakfast they forgot to put on the calendar . . .

  “Can you imagine where we’d be if Rebecca hadn’t shown up?” Zeb asked Will. “We all thanked our lucky stars. She turned out to be awfully good for the business.”

  Will had pulled his gaze from the screen. “Rebecca, good at business?” he’d said.

  “Good for business, actually. If not for her, we’d have long ago gone under.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Rebecca had said. “Why are you talking this way? The first time I helped with a party, I let fly a champagne cork straight into some woman’s bosom.”

  “Right! I’d forgotten. Most comical picture,” Zeb had told Will. “Rebecca pops off the cork and crumples to the floor in mortification, so it looked as if she were the one who’d been hit. Meanwhile the woman with the bosom goes on talking, completely unaware. Falsies, was my considered opinion. I was very observant about such things in those days.”

  “We never let on to my mother-in-law,” Rebecca said. “When she saw me on the floor she said, ‘Dearie? Are you all right?’ and I just said, ‘Yes, fine,’ and got up and poured the champagne.”

  She and Zeb had started laughing, while Will looked from one to the other with a tentative smile that seemed prepared to broaden as soon as he got the joke. “So,” he’d said finally, “I gather you were still living at home then, Zeb.”

  “Lord, yes,” Zeb had said, taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes. “Yes, I was still a kid when Joe and Rebecca married. The whole experience scarred me for life: seeing Rebecca walk out of their bedroom every morning all rosy and contented.”

  Rebecca had instantly sobered. She’d said, “Stop talking rubbish, Zeb.”

  It wasn’t like him to be cruel. She had glanced toward Will to see how he was taking it, but his gaze was fixed on the movie again. His head was craned forward earnestly and his long, articulated fingers were cupping his bony knees.

  Stodgy, she thought now. Wasn’t that the word the wedding guest had used? Well, Rebecca knew he was stodgy! She knew his literal cast of mind, his reliance on routine, his almost laughable pompousness. (That “Dr. Allenby speaking” when he answered the phone.) The thing was, to her those traits were endearing. More than that: she felt partly responsible for them. Any time she saw him looking lost and ill at ease, she was reminded all over again that she had once abandoned him.

  Which was why, yesterday afternoon, she had openly, pointedly, brazenly reached for his nearest hand and clasped it in her own.

  * * *

  She completely forgot about Grandparents’ Day. What was the matter with her? She made plans to go to D.C. with Will and visit a museum; Fridays he had no classes. When Peter called to remind her, she went into a secret flurry. “Oh!” she said. “Right. Tomorrow morning at . . . what time did you say? I’ve got it on my calendar.”

  So she had to phone Will and cancel, because she couldn’t break her promise to a child—especially Peter. (Not that she wasn’t tempted.) Will was very understanding about it. Still, she felt regretful and, to be honest, more than a little put upon. When NoNo said, the next morning, “You’re awfully nice to do this,” Rebecca wanted to tell her, “You don’t know the half of it!” But she didn’t, of course. What she said was, “Oh, I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks now!”

  They were standing on NoNo’s front porch, waiting for Peter to run back upstairs for his knapsack. “He’s so disorganized,” NoNo said. She was dressed in her florist’s smock, her purse already slung over her shoulder. “I tell you, mornings in this house are chaos. Find it?” she asked Peter. “All right, have a good day; I’ll pick you up this afternoon.”

  She kissed the top of his head, which meant she had to rise on tiptoe because (Rebecca realized) Peter had recently undergone one of those dramatic growth spurts that seemed to strike boys overnight. His trousers were so short that they showed two inches of ankle, and his blazer sleeves exposed his wrist bones, which looked like small ivory cabinet knobs. “You’re getting to be taller than I am!” Rebecca told him as they walked toward her car.

  He smiled faintly, hitching his knapsack higher on his back and sending her a sidelong glance from under his long lashes. “Next month I’m turning thirteen,” he said, and she fancied she could detect a new croakiness to his voice.

  His school was on the other side of the city. No wonder NoNo complained about the drive, Rebecca thought as she maneuvered through the rush-hour traffic, the crossing guards and gaggles of children on every corner, the sullen-looking workers waiting in clumps at bus stops. This was not a time of day when Rebecca was ordinarily out in the world. “How about your car pool?” she asked Peter. “Am I supposed to pick up anybody else?”

  “They’re all riding with their grandparents,” he said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “This one guy? T. R. Murphy? He’s got a matched set.”

  “Matched set of what?” Rebecca asked.

  “Grandparents. Mother’s mother, mother’s father. Father’s mother, father’s father.”

  “Lucky!” she said.

  “Dick Abrams is coming with eight grandparents, but they don’t really count because a lot of them are steps.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t mean stepgrandparents aren’t okay,” he said, shooting a worried look at her.

  “No, I know you don’t.”

  “They’re going to have to ride in three cars to get there. Really they could fit in two, but one set isn’t speaking to one of the other sets.”

  “This is fascinating,” Rebecca said.

  “Oh, and, um . . .” he said.

  He drummed his fingers on his knees for a moment and stared out the side window. Rebecca waited.

  “Um, would it be all right if I called you Gram?” he asked. “Just for today?”

  “Why, sweetie, you can call me that every day!”

  “Okay,” he said. And then, “So! Do you think that during our lifetime, people will start traveling by dema
terialization and rematerialization?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind trying it this morning,” she told him.

  This was intended as a joke, but when he didn’t laugh, she said, “I suppose they might, in theory. With all that could go wrong, though, imagine the lawsuits they could end up with.”

  “Lawsuits! Right!” he said. “Gosh!”

  She reflected that Peter was something like a yo-yo—popping up unexpectedly in sudden bursts of enthusiasm, subsiding and then popping up again with no warning. She smiled at him, but he was watching the street and he didn’t notice.

  In the entrance hall of his school—a stone building covered with ivy that looked arranged, rather than free-growing—they were met by a young woman passing out self-stick labels and felt-tip pens. Hi! the labels read. My grandson is __________. Rebecca wrote Peter Sanborn and returned the pen to the woman. The instant she had affixed the label to the front of her blouse, a small, bald man in a suit stepped up to her. “Peter Sanborn!” he cried.

  “Yes?”

  She was expecting him to offer some compliment on Peter’s project, but instead he seized her hand and said, “I want you to know that we have taken his stepmother’s complaint very, very seriously and we do understand her concerns.”

  “Her concerns?”

  “Naturally it’s an issue, at this time when families are so often fragmented. With all the working mothers, though, grandparents seemed the logical solution. It never occurred to us that . . . But now that Mrs. Sanborn’s alerted us, we have fully prepared ourselves for every possible contingency. In a case where a child lacks grandparents, we offer one on loan.”

  Rebecca gave a startled guffaw. The man peered solemnly into her face. “Students have been encouraged to apply at the office,” he told her. “Strictest confidence is guaranteed.”

  “That should reassure my daughter no end,” Rebecca told him.

  “My own mother is one of the names on file,” he said.

  “And then there’s always Dick Abrams,” she couldn’t resist adding.

  “Abrams?”

  “He has eight grandparents. Surely he should be asked to share the wealth.”

  “Oh, ah, I don’t feel we could—”

  “Just something to consider,” she told him, and she withdrew her hand.

  “What’s gotten into NoNo?” she asked Peter as they moved through the crowd. “Patch, I might expect it of, but NoNo, acting so contentious all of a sudden!”

  “That was our principal,” Peter said. “NoNo telephoned him last week.”

  “Well, isn’t that always the way! No sooner do you get your children nicely pigeonholed than they turn around and surprise you.”

  They were walking down a wide corridor, traveling in a swarm of gray-haired women, a sprinkling of gray-haired men, and an underlayer of boys in navy blazers. Two boys near Rebecca were trying to step on each other’s shoes. They elbowed and wrestled and stumbled into passersby while the middle-aged woman accompanying them sailed on serenely. One of them fell into Peter, but Peter just moved aside and the boy didn’t apologize. Rebecca had the impression that Peter didn’t know all that many of his schoolmates. She felt a familiar clenching of her shoulders, a sort of mother-bear response; she wanted to hug him close and snarl at the other children. But Peter showed no sign of discomfort. He seemed intent on maneuvering them toward the double doors ahead, which opened into a gigantic, echoing gymnasium filled with felt-draped tables and fabric screens.

  Rebecca had not thought to ask what type of exhibit this would be. She had expected science projects, since she’d spent a number of long, dull hours at science fairs in the past. But this appeared more art-related. Paintings were tacked to the screens; sculptures and clumsy ceramic vases and abstract wire constructions stood on the tables. Each had a name next to it, lettered in grade-school print on a rectangle of white poster board, and already some of the grandparents were saying, “Did you do this?” and, “Oh, my, isn’t this something!”

  “Which is yours?” Rebecca asked Peter.

  Instead of answering, he turned sideways to slip through a cluster of women. He rounded the first aisle and stopped short at the head of the second.

  There, in a glass box the size of a large aquarium, a sort of oil derrick made of brightly colored rods and sockets and toothed wheels pivoted up and down, allowing a series of blue marbles to roll the length of its spine and land in a metal saucer. Each marble was a slightly different size and rang out a different note on the scale: do, re, mi . . . From the saucer the marbles traveled through a convoluted tube and returned to their starting point, where they rolled down to land once again—do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, DO!, over and over, delicate musical plinks! that could be heard, she belatedly realized, throughout the gym. What caused the marbles’ return, she couldn’t imagine. She was mystified, and awestruck, and captivated. She could have stood there forever, rapt, and other people must have felt the same because quite a crowd had gathered, none of them in any hurry to move on.

  “Peter!” she said. “This is wonderful!”

  Peter tilted his head and studied the contraption critically, his hands deep in his pockets, his back angled forward beneath the weight of his knapsack.

  “This is . . . I don’t know how you did it! It’s amazing! What do your teachers say?” she asked him.

  “I think they kind of liked it.”

  “Is there a motor, or what?”

  “That’s a secret.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me, then. I’ll just view it as a miracle.”

  “But I will give you a hint,” he said. “Think about those toy birds that bob into a drinking glass.”

  “Ah,” she said, none the wiser.

  He said, “Would you like to see the other projects?”

  “No,” she said, “I believe I’ll just stay here and admire this one.”

  He grimaced and looked at the ceiling, implying, Grandmothers! What can you do? But she could tell he was pleased.

  * * *

  She phoned Will as soon as she got home; she felt stretched like a band of elastic until she heard his voice at the other end of the line. “I’m back,” she told him. “Did you go to D.C. without me?”

  “Oh, no, I would never do that.”

  “You should have,” she said. Although she was happy he hadn’t.

  “How was your grandson’s exhibit?”

  “It was marvelous! I wish you could have seen it.”

  “I wish I could have too,” he said.

  She let herself picture that, for a moment: Will at her side on Grandparents’ Day. Finally, finally, she would not have to show up everywhere alone. But he was asking her something. Asking her to dinner.

  She said, “Dinner? At your place?”

  “I thought maybe you might like to meet my daughter.”

  “I would love to meet your daughter,” she said.

  Already her mind was racing through possible outfits, possible topics of conversation—choosing who to be, really, for this very important encounter.

  He said, “How about tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow? Saturday? Oh.”

  She didn’t have to explain. He sighed and said, “I know. A party.”

  “But I could do it Sunday,” she told him.

  “All right: Sunday. I’m assuming she’ll be free then. Let’s make it early. Six o’clock, since it’s a school night.”

  “Can I bring a dish?”

  “No, just yourself,” Will said in a memorized way.

  She refrained from asking him which self.

  Later, talking on the phone to NoNo, she happened to let slip that she would be meeting Will’s daughter. “You’d think it would be no big deal,” she said, “after meeting you three girls. But I can’t help feeling nervous, a little.”

  “Oh, well, I’m sure you’ll do fine,” NoNo said absently. “Whose daughter is this, again?”

  “Will Allenby. He was with me a couple of weeks ago when you and Pet
er stopped by after dinner.”

  “Oh, yes,” NoNo said.

  “But I was forgetting! Peter! Peter’s the reason I called! NoNo, that boy is a genius.”

  “Yes, everyone tells me he’s bright,” NoNo said. “I only wish he could drive.”

  “Did you see his project?”

  “Are you kidding? I watched him construct it, every wheel and gear of it.”

  “I’m not sure whether it’s art, or science, or music,” Rebecca said. “Maybe all three. It’s astounding!”

  “I was the one who had to ferry him to the back of beyond for his supplies,” NoNo told her. “Barry was away attending a conference, wouldn’t you know.”

  “Oh, honey,” Rebecca said, “I realize it must be hard, but I wish you could enjoy this boy. He’s going to be grown and gone in a flash! And then you’ll discover you miss him.”

  “Easy for you to say,” NoNo told her bitterly. “You don’t have the least idea what it’s like, being saddled with somebody else’s kid when you’re basically still on your honeymoon.”

  Rebecca said, “Is that so.”

  It was one of those moments when she really did, literally, have to bite her tongue in order not to say more.

  * * *

  Sunday morning, she called Will twice to ask what she should wear. The first time, he said, “Anything. Or maybe—but no, just anything.” Which was why she called the second time: that little hitch in his voice. She called back a minute later and said, “Will. You can tell me. Was there something special that you thought I ought to be wearing?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Something I ought not to be wearing?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe just . . . something not too hippie,” he said.

  “Hippie,” she said.

  For a second, she felt hurt. She thought he was referring to the size of her hips. But he went on to say, “It’s only that a few of your clothes tend to be sort of . . . striking, and I would like Beatrice to focus on you more as a person.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, sure. In that case.”