Ladder of Years Read online

  As if he guessed, he went on kneeling there, looking into her face.

  “Delia?” Noah said. “Can I invite—?”

  Both of them jumped. Joel dropped her foot and stood up. He said, “Noah! I thought you were off at your mother’s.”

  Noah stood in the doorway, frowning.

  “We were just, ah, taping Delia’s ankle,” Joel told him. “It seems she must have sprained it.”

  Delia said, “Rest, ice, compression, elevation! That’s the menon … menonom …” She laughed, short of breath. “Oh, Lord, I never can pronounce it.”

  Noah just watched her. Finally he said, “Can I invite Jack for supper?”

  “Oh, of course!” she said. “Yes! Good idea!”

  He looked at her a moment longer, looked at his father, then turned and walked out.

  ———

  Joel wouldn’t let her cook that night. He settled her on the family-room couch with her feet up and the cat in her lap, and he went off to order a pizza. Meanwhile Noah and Jack sprawled on the floor in front of the TV. Some kind of thriller was playing. During the more suspenseful scenes a piano tinkled hypnotically. Delia loosened her hold on George and leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

  Behind her lids, she saw the gritty surface of Highway 50 rushing toward her. She saw the Plymouth darting across a stream of traffic, miraculously avoiding collision like a blip in a video game. She jerked awake, eyes wide and staring, shaken all over again by the narrowness of her escape.

  17

  The cut on Delia’s forehead healed quickly, leaving just the faintest white fishhook of a scar. The sprain, though, took longer. She favored her right ankle for weeks. “This is not my actual walk,” she wanted to tell passersby, for she felt, somehow, at a disadvantage—second rate, inferior. She wondered how people endured it when they knew they’d be disabled forever, like some of the residents in Senior City.

  Senior City was the one place where her limp attracted no attention. She could proceed unhurriedly toward a waiting elevator, trusting the other passengers to hold it for her. When she finally stepped inside, she would find them conversing among themselves without a sign of impatience, one of them leaning absently on the Open button till Delia reminded her to release it. No longer did their own infirmities seem so apparent, either, or their wrinkles or white hair. Delia had adjusted her slant of vision over the past months.

  And what a contrast Binky made! For anyone could see now that she was pregnant. By May she was in maternity clothes. By early June she was cupping her belly like an apronful of fruit as she rose from a chair. “Seems like things are more so, with this one,” she told Delia. “When I had the boys I hardly showed till the end. I used to wear unzipped jeans and one of my husband’s long-tailed shirts. But now I have to squeeze through car doors sideways and I’ve still got three months to go.”

  There was no question that this baby was unplanned. Binky said she’d been twelve weeks along before she suspected a thing—had continued proclaiming her June wedding date to all and sundry. “Then I said, ‘What is this?’ and I went to see my doctor. When he told me I was pregnant I just looked at him. He said, ‘But nowadays, thirty-eight is nothing. Lots of women give birth at thirty-eight.’ I said, ‘How about sixty-seven?’ He said, ‘Sixty-seven?’ I said, ‘That’s the age of the father.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ Said, ‘I see.’ Said, ‘Hmm.’”

  “I view it this way,” Nat told Delia. “What better place for childbirth than a retirement community? Here we have all these doctors and nurses, just standing by twiddling their thumbs on Floor Four.”

  Delia was horrified. She said, “You would go to Floor Four for this?”

  “He’s teasing,” Binky told her.

  “We’ll turn the cardiac unit into a labor room,” Nat went on impishly. “Use one of those railed hospital beds for a crib. And Lord knows these folks have got enough diapers around. Right, Noah?”

  Noah grinned, but only at his teacup. He had reached that age where any talk of bodily functions was a monumental embarrassment.

  “The best part is,” Nat said, “whoever drew up the bylaws for Senior City never dreamed of this eventuality. All our contract says is, ‘Applicants must be sixty-five before entering,’ but this baby isn’t an applicant. However, we did lose the Floor Two dispute. You heard we asked permission to move down to Floor Two? Now that I have Binky to look after me, I said … but the board said no. Said it wasn’t the way the place worked. Progression was supposed to be up, they said; not down.”

  “Well, perhaps it’s for the best,” Binky told him. “Our neighbors on Three would be heartbroken to lose us, now the baby’s coming.”

  “Yes, she certainly won’t lack for sitters,” Nat said dryly.

  He kept insisting that the baby was a girl, even though they had chosen not to learn the sex. Girls were the only babies he’d had experience of, he said. He tried to convince Noah that all babies were girls but metamorphosed, some of them, into boys at about the same time their eyes darkened.

  “You wouldn’t believe how many old ladies are working on booties right now,” he told Delia. “Little knitted slippers, socks, embroidered Mary Janes … Kid is going to be the Imelda Marcos of the nursery set.”

  Still, both Nat and Binky must have misgivings, Delia thought. How could they not? She was awed by their determined good cheer—by Binky’s habit of telling people, “We couldn’t be more pleased,” as if prompting them; and by Nat’s solicitude, even as he hobbled around as fragile and easily overturned as something constructed of Tinkertoys.

  “When my first wife was dying,” he told Delia one afternoon, “I used to sit by her bed and I thought, This is her true face. It was all hollowed and sharpened. In her youth she’d been very pretty, but now I saw that her younger face had been just a kind of rough draft. Old age was the completed form, the final, finished version she’d been aiming at from the start. The real thing at last! I thought, and I can’t tell you how that notion colored things for me from then on. Attractive young people I saw on the street looked so … temporary. I asked myself why they bothered dolling up. Didn’t they understand where they were headed? But nobody ever does, it seems. All those years when I was a child, longing for it to be ‘my turn,’ it hadn’t ever occurred to me that my turn would be over, by and by. Then Binky came along. Is it any wonder I feel I’ve been born again?”

  Binky was present when he said this, and she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Me too, sweetheart,” she told him.

  Delia grew suddenly conscious of her own separateness—of her upright posture, her elbows pressed primly against her sides in an armchair all to herself.

  Then it was summer, warm and green and buzzing with cicadas after a long, cool spring. School came to an end, and Noah started sleeping late and hanging around the house with his friends and complaining of boredom. Joel switched to vacation hours and was home by midafternoon. In the maple tree out back, a woodpecker couple built themselves a nest. Delia could hear their cries from time to time—high-pitched, excited squawks that reminded her of girls’-school girls attending their first mixed party. And on Highway 50, more and more cars sped toward the beach, their rooftops spinning with bicycle wheels, their back seats stuffed with children, their rear window ledges a coagulation of sand shovels, rubber flippers, and Utz potato chip cartons.

  Would Delia’s family be going to the beach themselves? she wondered. It was June, after all. It was a year since she had left them, although it seemed much longer. She had, by now, done everything at least once—observed a birthday alone as well as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. Paid her income taxes (married filing separately). Registered to vote. Taken the cat to the vet. She was a bona fide citizen of Bay Borough.

  Then a letter arrived from Susie.

  The envelope bore the correct address, which meant that Susie must have consulted Eliza or Eleanor. The handwriting was so rounded that Borough resembled a row of balloons anchored by a single string. De
lia lifted the flap almost stealthily, unsealing it rather than tearing it, as if this would soften the impact of whatever waited inside.

  Hi Mom!

  Just a quick note to fill you in! How you doing? Thanx for the graduation card! Commencement was kind of a drag but Tucky Pearson gave the most awesome party afterwards at her family’s horse farm!

  Nothing special to report except Dad is being so-o-o-o difficult right now! I know you’ll see my side of things so could you maybe phone him and have a talk? Don’t tell him I asked you to call—just say you got a letter from me and thought you should discuss my plans. You wouldn’t believe how mean he’s being! Or maybe you would! Honestly Mom sometimes I don’t even blame you for going! See ya!

  Luv, Susie

  Delia had a sudden sense of exhaustion. She refolded the letter and put it back in the envelope.

  Well.

  She couldn’t phone from the house. She didn’t want the call appearing on Joel’s bill. Nor did she want to reverse the charges, which would give an impression of needfulness. So first she had to scrounge through her handbag and various pockets for change, and then she had to walk to the pay phone at Bay and Weber Streets, a block and a half away. She walked as fast as her ankle allowed, because if she made her call between eleven-thirty and twelve, she had a better chance of reaching Sam directly. He always broke for lunch then. Unless, in her absence, things had altered more than she had predicted.

  Inside the booth—just one of those above-the-waist, partially enclosed affairs that let in every traffic sound—she lined up her coins on the shelf and then dialed the grown-ups’ number. She had never called long distance from a pay phone before, and she was distressed to find that she had to wait to deposit the coins till her party answered. First the phone at the other end rang twice, then Sam said, “Dr. Grinstead,” and then a recording issued instructions and Delia dropped her quarters in. Whang! Whang! It was humiliating—very nearly as bad as calling collect, and made worse by the fact that Sam didn’t grasp what was going on. “Hello?” he kept saying. “Is anyone there?”

  His deep, level voice, his habit of slanting downward even on questions.

  Delia said, “Sam?”

  “Where are you?” he asked immediately.

  He assumed this was a plea for help, she realized. He thought she was admitting defeat—calling to say, “Come get me.” He must have been expecting it for months. She stood straighter. “I’m calling about Susie,” she told him.

  A dead silence. Then: “Oh. Susie.”

  “I wonder if you know what’s troubling her.”

  “I believe my feeble brain can encompass that much,” he said icily. “But I suppose you’re going to tell me anyhow, aren’t you.”

  “What?” Delia pressed her fingers to her forehead. “No, wait—I mean I’m honestly asking! She wrote me there was some problem, but she didn’t say what it was.”

  “Oh,” Sam said again. Another silence. “Well,” he said, “this would have to do with her wedding, I suspect.”

  “Susie’s getting married?”

  “She wants to. I’m opposed.”

  “But—” Delia said. But she didn’t talk to me about this! she wanted to protest. Didn’t even consult me! Unreasonable, she knew; so she changed it to, “But Driscoll’s a very nice boy. It is Driscoll, isn’t it?”

  “Who else,” Sam said. “However, that’s not the issue. She can marry whoever she chooses, of course, but I told her she’ll have to live on her own for one calendar year beforehand.”

  “A year! Why?”

  “I hate to see her jumping straight from school to marriage. From her father’s house to her husband’s house.”

  Her father’s house? He hated to see? How about her mother? Oh, all right … but her husband’s house?

  And the biggest offense of all: what he meant was, he didn’t want Susie turning out like Delia. Who had never spent so much as a night on her own before she married; and just look at the results.

  He’d been mulling that over all year, she supposed. Arriving at his own private theory.

  “But if she lives alone,” Delia said, “she’ll be so … unprotected. And also she and Driscoll might … I mean, what if they end up, um, sleeping together or something like that?”

  “Don’t you suppose they already sleep together, Delia?”

  Her mouth dropped open.

  A taped voice said metallically, “To continue your call, please deposit another—”

  “Hold on, I’m going to try to get these charges reversed,” Sam told Delia.

  She didn’t argue. She was trying to reassemble her thoughts. Well, no doubt they did sleep together. On some level, she’d probably known that. Still, she felt bereft. She pictured herself waving goodbye while Susie and Driscoll dwindled into the distance, never once looking back.

  “You know she doesn’t have a job yet,” Sam said when he’d dealt with the operator.

  “I wondered about that.”

  Amazing, how easy it was to fall back into this matter-of-fact, almost chatty exchange of information. The ordinariness of it struck her as surreal.

  “She sleeps till all hours,” he was saying, “and then heads off to the swimming pool. No interviews set up, no mention of careers …”

  But if she’s getting married, Delia thought. That too, though, she censored. She asked, “How about Driscoll? Does he have a job?”

  “Yes, he’s hired on with his father.”

  Delia tried to think what Driscoll’s father did, but she couldn’t remember. Something businessy. She said, “Well, have you and Susie talked about this? Discussed what kind of work might interest her?”

  “No,” Sam said.

  “And where could she afford to live? I mean, if she isn’t earning money yet.”

  “We haven’t gone into that,” Sam said.

  “Well, golly, Sam, what have you gone into?”

  “Nothing,” Sam said. He gave a slight cough. “It appears that we’re not speaking.”

  Delia sighed. She said, “How about Eliza? I know Susie must talk to her.”

  “Not necessarily,” Sam said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think they do talk, to tell the truth.”

  “They had a fight?”

  “I’m not sure. Well, they did, I guess, but I’m not sure if it’s still on or not. Actually, Eliza is out of town right now.”

  “Out of town!”

  “She’s visiting Linda awhile.”

  Delia digested this. She said, “Aren’t you all taking your beach trip this year?”

  “No, Delia,” Sam told her, and the iciness was back in his voice. Delia understood his point as clearly as if he’d stated it: Do you really imagine we’d go back to the beach, now that you’ve ruined it for all of us forever?

  Hastily she said, “So no one’s sat Susie down and discussed her options with her.”

  “I fail to see how I can hold a discussion with someone who walks out of a room the instant I walk in,” Sam said.

  You follow her, is how, Delia wanted to tell him. You walk out after her. What’s so hard about that? But for Sam it would be unthinkable, she knew. He wasn’t a man who laid himself open to rebuff. He didn’t like to plead, or bargain, or reverse himself; he had never made a mistake in all his life. (And was that why the people around him seemed to make so many?)

  A delivery truck wheezed past, and she covered her free ear. “All right,” she said, “here’s what I propose. I’m going to write and tell her that if she wants you to pay for her wedding, she’ll have to accept your conditions. And if she doesn’t like those conditions, then she can pay for her own wedding. Either way, you will go along with it.”

  “I will?”

  “You will.”

  “But then she might decide to marry him tomorrow.”

  “If she does, she does,” Delia said. “That’s up to her.”

  Sam was quiet. Delia’s ankle had started to pound, but she di
dn’t push him. Finally he said, “How about the not-speaking part?”

  “How about it?”

  “Could you tell her to talk all this over with me?”

  “I could suggest it,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  She felt uncomfortable in this new role. She said, “So! Everything else all right?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Boys okay?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “Who’s taking care of the office while Eliza’s gone?”

  “I am.”

  “Maybe that’s a job for Susie.”

  “Never,” he said flatly.

  Another stab to the heart. Never, he meant, would I let my daughter follow her mother’s wretched example. And she couldn’t even argue with that. She said, “I guess I’ll be going, then.”

  “Oh. Well. Goodbye,” he said.

  After she hung up, it occurred to her that on the other hand, maybe he was just saying Susie would be a disaster in the office. It was true that she was hopeless when it came to organizational matters. Unlike Delia, who had a gift for them.

  Could that have been what he’d meant?

  In her letter to Susie she included one request that she hadn’t mentioned to Sam beforehand. When you do get married, she wrote, whatever kind of wedding it may be, will you let me come? I couldn’t blame you if you didn’t, but …

  She wrote that afternoon, using the desk in the family room, choosing a time when she had the house to herself. Before she was finished, though, Joel came home. He said, “Oh, here you are.” Then he stood about for a while, jingling coins deep in his pocket. At last she stopped writing and looked up at him.

  “Was there something you wanted?” she asked.

  “No, no,” he said, and he moved away, went off to another part of the house. But as soon as she had finished the letter, he was back again. He must have heard her starting supper preparations. He stood in the kitchen doorway, once again jingling his coins. “Saw you on Weber Street today,” he said.