Back When We Were Grownups Read online

That night, she dreamed she was traveling on a train with her teenaged son.

  Never mind that she had no son. Never mind that if she had, he would have been a grown man by now. In her dream, she took it for granted that this tall, quiet, gawky young boy belonged to her without question. His hair was the same fair color as hers, except that it hung in a shock to one side. He was thinner than Rebecca had ever been, but he had her gray eyes and sharp nose. And most familiar of all was some quality in his expression, something hopeful and wistful, some sense he felt a little bit outside of things. Didn’t she know that feeling! She recognized immediately the shy, uncertain edginess at the corners of his mouth.

  He had the window seat; she had the aisle. He was gazing out at the scenery and so was she, supposedly, but really she was seizing the chance to dwell on his dear profile. She felt a wash of love for him—the deep, pervasive, abiding love you feel for one of your own.

  When she woke up she was sorry, and she tried to go back to her dream again but she couldn’t.

  * * *

  She lay awake in the bed that she had come to as a bride, in the room that she had slept in for over thirty years. For the majority of her life, in fact; so why did she still think of this house as somebody else’s? The Davitches’ house, not hers. The Davitches’ ornate but crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, with its two high-ceilinged parlors, front and rear, its antiquated backyard kitchen connected to the dining room by an afterthought of a passageway, its elaborate carved moldings and butterfly-parquet floors and seven sculptured marble mantelpieces overhanging seven fireplaces, five of them defunct.

  The ground level provided the family’s subsistence; they rented it out for parties. Christenings, graduation teas, wedding receptions, retirement dinners . . . All of Life’s Occasions from the Cradle to the Grave, as their ad in the Yellow Pages put it. For Your Next Important Social Event, “Experience the Charms of the Open Arms.”

  Funny name for such a narrow, shutter-faced house, she’d always thought.

  She’d thought it the first time she came here, nineteen years old and dressed head to toe in blue, a heavyset, timid young woman standing out on the sidewalk peering up at the shield-shaped sign. The Open Arms, Est. 1951. Nothing open about it at all, not that she could see. Although possibly she’d been influenced by the fact that parties of any kind whatsoever were her idea of torture.

  Oh, life worked out so surprisingly, didn’t it?

  The flannel darkness high above her turned white and then transparent, and the birds began to sing in the poplar tree next door, and the grandfather clock downstairs gave off six mournful dongs. Rebecca finally got out of bed and shook her nightgown around her ankles and went over to raise the window shade. It was going to be another sunny day. Chips of blue sky showed behind the rooftops. She watched a traffic helicopter cross the space between two faraway buildings, its propeller a brisk, busy blur above its head.

  This was not the master bedroom. (That had somehow gone to Poppy, after her mother-in-law died.) It was her husband’s boyhood room, and traces of his boyhood enthusiasms could still be found here and there—in the half-dozen odd-colored rocks arranged on top of the bookcase, the framed display of wheat-sheaf pennies hanging on one wall, the Baltimore Colts decal plastered irremovably inside the closet door. Joe Davitch had been full of enthusiasms, even as a grown man. He’d been large in spirit and in frame, exuberant and outgoing, booming-voiced, quick to laugh, given to flinging out both hands in a gesture of wholehearted welcome.

  Really it was Joe who had had the open arms.

  She turned from the window and collected her clothes: an Indian blouse embroidered with peacocks, a flounced calico skirt, and the white cotton, old-lady underwear she had come to favor now that there was no one else to see it. She clutched all this to her chest and crossed the hall to the bathroom, which gave off the comforting smell of aged enamel paint and Ivory soap. The radiator was as filigreed and scrolled as a silver tea urn. The claw-footed bathtub was big enough to sleep in.

  Then halfway through her shower: bam-bam! Poppy, knocking on the bathroom door. She squinched her face against the spray and started humming, because she wanted to go on musing about the boy in her dream. His stubby blond eyelashes. (Her lashes, which didn’t even show unless she remembered, as she rarely did, to brush them with mascara.) His long-fingered, angular hands. (The hands were not hers, but whose, then? Whom did they remind her of?)

  At some point Poppy gave up and went away, but she couldn’t have said just when.

  * * *

  “I had the oddest dream,” she told Poppy over breakfast.

  “Were there any numbers in it?”

  She was startled, not so much by the question as by the fact that he had heard her. Nowadays, he seemed to be absent so often. She looked at him over her coffee cup and realized, much later than she should have, that he was dressed wrong. He was wearing a pair of brown suit pants and a sleeveless undershirt but no shirt, so that his suspenders cut directly across his whiskery bare shoulders. After breakfast she would have to talk him into something more appropriate.

  “If you can recall any numbers,” he told her, “my friend Alex—remember Alex Ames from my teaching days?—he is always after me for numbers to play the lottery with. He wants the numbers from my dreams, but I don’t have any dreams anymore.”

  “Sorry, no,” she told him. “This was about a boy. He seemed to be my son.”

  “Which one?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Which of your sons was it?”

  “Poppy,” she said. “I don’t have any sons.”

  “Then what’d you go and dream about them for?”

  She sighed and took another sip of coffee.

  This was a man unrelated to her—an uncle only by marriage. The brother of her late father-in-law. Yet here they were, living out their lives together like some cranky old married couple. Her mother-in-law and Joe had invited Poppy to stay for a while after his wife died, when it seemed he was about to turn into a telephone drunk. (Calling up at all hours: “Can I honestly be expected to go on without my Joycie?”) Then her mother-in-law died; then Joe himself died—killed in a car wreck just six years after their wedding—and somehow, Poppy had never left. Rebecca had spent more years now with Poppy than with anyone she’d ever known; and she didn’t even especially like the man, which was not to say she actively disliked him. She just thought of him as a kind of fellow boarder. It was a matter of pure happenstance that she was the one who had to listen to the state of his bowels every morning, and accompany him on his exercise walk, and ferry him to the doctor and the dentist and the physical therapist.

  But he was someone to talk to, at least; so she tried again. “In my dream I was on a train,” she told him, “and this boy was sitting next to me. He was, I don’t know, in his early teens—that awkward, beanpole stage just after they get their growth spurt—and it seemed to be understood that he was my son.”

  “Do you recall what number train it was?”

  “No, and I don’t know where we were going, either. Just that he and I were traveling.”

  And that she loved him, she wanted to say. But that would sound so theatrical, in this normal, workaday kitchen with the linoleum worn black and the chimney bricks all pocked, the checked plastic tablecloth sandy with toast crumbs, the glass-paned cupboard doors reflecting squares of yellow sunshine.

  “Well,” Poppy said, “I would call that a dream that was lacking in plot. In fact it’s sort of uninteresting; so I’d like to switch the subject to my birthday.”

  “Your birthday!” She felt disoriented. “The birthday you just had?”

  “The birthday coming up.”

  “But that’s not till December!”

  “Yes, December eleventh. I’m going to be one hundred.”

  “Well, I know that, Poppy,” she said.

  He didn’t look it. He had hit a kind of wall in the aging process; he seemed old but not astronomically old, ju
st slightly more shrunken than when she’d first met him. His white mustache was still bushy, and his face (unshaven, till after breakfast) bore only a few deep crevices rather than the netting of wrinkles you would expect.

  “I suppose,” he said, suddenly absorbed in pressing an index finger to the toast crumbs, “you’re planning some big wingding for me. I mean bigger than your usual.”

  “Oh. Well. Yes, certainly I am!” she said. It was his averted gaze that let her know he wanted a wingding; that he wasn’t bringing it up just to discourage the notion. “December’s still pretty far away,” she told him, “but when we get a bit closer, oh, I’m going to need your advice about all kinds of things!”

  “I do happen to have a guest list,” he said.

  “Wonderful, Poppy.”

  She thought he meant he had a guest list somewhere, but he started fumbling through his trousers and finally came up with a small, fat square of folded paper. As he passed it across the table to her, the telephone rang. She rose to answer, but not before she had tucked the list in her skirt pocket and patted the pocket several times in a reassuring way.

  It was NoNo on the phone. “I called to say thanks for the picnic,” she said. “Barry says thanks, too. He’s going to write you a note.”

  “Oh, honey, he doesn’t have to do that,” Rebecca said. She was watching Poppy, who had started eating marmalade straight from the jar. “I’m just glad you both enjoyed it.”

  “He really liked our family,” NoNo said.

  Her words hung in the air, waiting; so Rebecca said, “And we liked him! All of us just loved him.”

  Poppy raised his eyebrows at her. She turned away from him and cupped the receiver. “How’s his little boy?” she asked. “He didn’t catch cold, I hope.”

  “He’s fine, I assume, but I haven’t called them yet today because Barry’s mornings are so frantic. If you could see how the two of them live! He has Peter wear tomorrow’s clothes to bed on school nights, just to save time.”

  “Goodness,” Rebecca said. “Now, where is Peter’s mother, exactly?”

  “Who knows! She went off with a bunch of Buddhists or something; lives in some kind of commune somewhere.”

  This was not so very different from NoNo’s mother, who had abandoned her three children for a career as a New York nightclub singer. (Or would-be singer.) But Rebecca thought it wisest not to point that out. She said, “You’re going to be a real help, once the two of you are married.”

  “Yes, I thought I would start closing my shop a little earlier, so that Peter won’t be alone so many hours after school.”

  “What does he do now that it’s summer?” Rebecca asked.

  “Oh, eventually there’s day camp. Till that begins, he just stays in the house. He’s pretty used to fending for himself.”

  “Maybe he’ll get to be friends with Danny. They’re almost the same age, after all.”

  “Well . . .” NoNo said, in a doubtful tone.

  Rebecca couldn’t much blame her. Danny was such an athlete, with an athlete’s easy confidence in his own body. The two boys seemed two different species, almost. So she didn’t push it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Poppy leaving the kitchen with the marmalade jar tucked under his arm, and she said, “I’d better go. Have a good day, sweetie!”

  “Thanks, Beck,” NoNo said. “And thanks again for the picnic.”

  Rebecca hung up and went chasing after Poppy, who could make remarkable speed for an old man with a cane.

  * * *

  Her dream was the kind that lingered, coloring the whole morning. Bits of it rose like dust from her pillows when she plumped them—a sense of travel, a sense of longing. When she heard the harmonica sound of a train whistle from Penn Station, she felt a little pinch of loneliness deep in her chest.

  The plasterer called; then Biddy called; then a woman called about a bridal shower. (Rebecca’s life was ruled by the telephone, she always said.) Each time she collected her thoughts to answer, she got that cotton-headed, almost nauseated feeling that comes from surfacing too abruptly from too heavy a sleep. More than one caller had to say, “Hello? Are you still there?”

  When she opened Poppy’s closet to find him a shirt, the sweetish smell of worn clothing brought back the scent of her son. When she settled on the couch to pair socks, the feel of the fuzzy upholstery reminded her of the train seat—which, she recollected, had been covered in wine-colored plush of a sort she had not seen on trains in forty years.

  * * *

  Her daughter dropped by to leave her two children while she went to the obstetrician. “Anyone home?” she called, and the front door banged, as it always did, against the door of the closet. (Closet, ladies’ powder room, men’s—all these had been crammed into one side of the foyer, not very adeptly, when the Open Arms first went into business.) Rebecca invited her in, half hoping she would refuse because the morning was getting away from her, here. But Min Foo said, “Maybe for a minute,” and sent the children upstairs with their stack of videotapes. “Two whole months to go,” she said, leading the way to the kitchen, “or three if this is another ten-month pregnancy, and already I’ve gained twenty-one pounds. I look like a cow.”

  Actually she looked more like a plum, or some other ripe, luscious fruit. She wore a black silk maternity dress and loops of golden chains strung with golden disks, and she walked with a slow, sultry, swaying motion that Rebecca found hypnotic. In the kitchen she sank onto a chair, her jewelry tinkling exotically. Rebecca said, “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Mom! No way can I have coffee!”

  “Oh, yes,” Rebecca said. Such silly rules they had, nowadays. “Well, I believe there’s some orange juice somewhere.”

  She started hunting through the refrigerator, which was filled with picnic leftovers. “I dreamed the strangest dream last night,” she said over her shoulder. She shifted a plate hooded in foil. “I dreamed I had a son.”

  “Maybe that’s a sign my baby will be a boy,” Min Foo said.

  This struck Rebecca as the slightest bit self-centered. “No,” she said, “you weren’t anywhere to be seen. And besides, he didn’t have your coloring. He was a blond.”

  Min Foo, like her three half-sisters, was a brunette, and she had Joe’s burnished olive skin and his narrow, sleepy eyes—almost Asian eyes, in her case, which was how she’d earned her nickname. Her real name was Minerva (Rebecca’s choice, for this child who would be hers, she’d imagined—the same calm, quiet, bookish type she herself had once been), but Joe had taken one look at the baby in her hospital cot, at her paintbrush hair and her eyes no wider than slits, and, “Hey there, little Min Foo,” he had said. She had never been anything but, from then on. So much for Minerva.

  And forget about calm! Or quiet! Here she was now, all spiky and indignant: “I could have a blond baby! Certainly I could. Half my genes are yours, remember.”

  “Well, maybe with Lawrence you could have,” Rebecca said. “But I seriously doubt you can hope for any blond genes from Hakim.”

  Min Foo said, “Oh.”

  Rebecca gave up on the orange juice and shut the fridge door as unnoticeably as possible. “Min Foo,” she said. “Sweetheart. Um, once this baby is born, you won’t send Hakim packing, will you?”

  “Send him packing?”

  “The way you did the others.”

  Min Foo gave her a blank, astonished stare.

  “I just couldn’t help but notice,” Rebecca told her, “that you always divorce your husbands after you have their babies.”

  “Always!” Min Foo repeated. “You talk as if I’d had fifty husbands!”

  “Well, but . . . three is not a negligible number, you have to admit.”

  “It’s no fault of mine that I happened to hit a teensy little run of bad luck,” Min Foo said. “Honestly! You make such a big deal about that. Every time I turn around, some jibing, jabbing remark. ‘You’re not booked this weekend, are you? Getting married or anything.’ And, ‘Oh, that w
as a gift from what’s-his-name, one of Min Foo’s husbands.’”

  Rebecca laughed, impressed by her own wittiness, but Min Foo stayed serious. “Everything’s just a joke to you,” she said bitterly. “Even at our wedding reception: someone says how nice it is and you say, ‘Well, it ought to be nice, as much practice as Min Foo’s given me.’” She gathered the folds of her dress and stood up. “Don’t bother seeing me out,” she said. “I’m leaving.”

  “Sweetheart!”

  “I’m late for my appointment, anyhow.”

  “Oh, all right,” Rebecca said sadly, and she trailed her to the front of the house, trying to think of some parting comment that would smooth things over. But none came to her.

  Her brother-in-law had a theory that Min Foo’s many marriages were her way of trying on other lives. The first husband had been a professor in his sixties, and Min Foo (age twenty-one) had instantly turned into a settled faculty matron. But with the second husband, who was black and eight years her junior (two differences, Zeb pointed out; very efficient of her), she’d become a young slip of a girl and taken to wearing a head-wrap. Hakim, now, had her spangled with Muslim holy medals. Rebecca liked Hakim, but she was careful not to get overly invested in him. That was why she kept up the pretense that she didn’t know where he was from. Of course she knew where he was from; she wasn’t senile. But, “Oh, he’s something, ah, Middle Eastern, I believe,” she would say when asked.

  Oops. Just the sort of remark that Min Foo had been objecting to.

  * * *

  The children were upstairs in the ex-nursery that served as the family room, watching a videotaped cartoon. You had only to look at them to guess Min Foo’s whole history—Joey a freckled eight-year-old with straight black hair and blue eyes, Lateesha four years younger and decked out in tiny beaded braids, her skin the warm, soft brown of a baked potato.

  “Hey, kids,” Rebecca said, “who wants to help me decorate for a party?”

  They didn’t take their eyes from the screen, but Joey said, “What kind of party?”

  “Graduation; high-school graduation. Teenagers galore! I’ll need to consult with you two so I don’t do anything uncool.”