Back When We Were Grownups Page 8

  She didn’t contradict him.

  Everything might have turned out differently if she had.

  He said he had started the Open Arms in 1951, when he’d left college for financial reasons after his father—an ironically uninsured insurance agent—had died without warning. “So is that . . . what you do?” Rebecca asked him. “I mean, is that your whole profession?”

  “Yes, there you have it,” he said. “Nothing in my life but parties, parties, parties.”

  She glanced at him, thinking she had detected a certain edge in his voice. But then he went on to give a very amusing account of a christening celebration where a child had dropped the baby into the punch bowl, and she decided she’d been imagining things.

  She did tell him about Will Allenby. Or she alluded to him, at least: she said, “my date and I,” when discussing a movie she’d seen. Granted, she didn’t use the term boyfriend. But that would have been sort of tactless, wouldn’t it? Sort of bragging and inconsiderate.

  Will Allenby was long-boned and slender and self-contained, with a cloud of yellow curls and an expression of luminous sweetness. He attended Macadam too—certainly not by coincidence—and they were planning to marry as soon as they graduated. This was in the 1960s, when half their classmates seemed to be sleeping with the other half, but they themselves were waiting till after their wedding. At the end of every evening, they kissed and kissed and kissed, clinging to each other, trembling, but then they parted company—Will to go off to his dorm, Rebecca to hers. “Au revoir,” Will always said, because using the word goodbye, he claimed, would make him too sad. Rebecca found this incredibly romantic, especially when he remembered to gargle that first r the way the French did.

  None of this came up in her conversation with Joe at the diner, however, or in any of their other conversations. For there were other conversations. He telephoned two days later to solicit her advice about a Sweet Sixteen party. Rebecca had never been Sweet Sixteen herself (she’d been sixteen-going-on-forty, she felt), but nobody would have guessed it from her flood of helpful suggestions. And when he dropped by the following week on his way to a linen outlet, although Macadam wasn’t really on his way at all, wouldn’t her friends have been surprised to see how readily she slid into his car to accompany him, and how authoritatively she coached him on his selection of cocktail napkins, embroidered guest towels, and stenciled table runners!

  “I find myself in Macadam” became his regular excuse, although Macadam was nearly an hour’s drive from Baltimore, over near D.C. “I find myself in Macadam and I wondered if you’d like to . . .” Grab a cup of coffee. Hunt a book in the college bookstore. Help select new stemware. In the course of three weeks he visited seven times, and after every visit, her first act was to return to her room and check her own face in the mirror. Her pink cheeks and her shining eyes, still a bit damp from laughter, and her heavy crown of braids. Was this how Joe Davitch saw her?

  She spent an hour, once, doodling what looked like birds in flight—those shorthand double tildes that children fill the skies of their drawings with—before she admitted to herself that she was trying to capture the shape of his upper lip.

  It was inevitable that Will should find out. His roommate reported seeing her with “some man” in downtown Macadam. Rebecca said, “Oh, for goodness sake. That was only Joe Davitch! He’s thirty-three years old. He’s nothing but a friend.”

  Noticing, meanwhile, how she treasured the excuse to utter his name.

  Although she believed that she meant what she said: she wasn’t in love with Joe. It was more that she was swept along by him, was how she put it to herself. She fell into this giddy mood whenever she was with him—laughing so uncontrollably, acting so lighthearted. Acting lighthearted. It wasn’t her true nature.

  Once when they were taking a drive she developed such a case of the giggles that she popped a button on the waistband of her skirt. (They were listening to a ball game and he began impersonating one of those chatty sports commentators—inventing human-interest stories about the players because, he said, baseball was so slow-moving that they’d both die of boredom otherwise. “How’s that pitcher coming along with potty-training his kid, do you know?” he asked his imaginary colleague.) And once he brought his three daughters with him, and Rebecca, as easily as breathing, rallied them around and raced them to the little pond behind the gym, ducking into the cafeteria for stale rolls as they passed. “Look!” she called when they reached the pond. “Fish! Who wants to feed them?” The children stared at her silently—stolid Biddy, who seemed to have no recollection of meeting her before, and belligerent Patch and wary little NoNo. Eventually, though, they accepted the rolls and tossed them into the water. Rebecca said, “Wonderful!” and clapped her hands together. Joe stood slightly apart, smiling his fond smile at her.

  With his thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets.

  His beautifully hinged pelvic bones.

  His narrow, dark-brown eyes watching only Rebecca.

  * * *

  He telephoned one Wednesday afternoon and invited her to supper at his house the following evening. “My mother wants to make it up to you,” he said. “She’s ashamed of falling apart the night you first came here.”

  Rebecca hesitated. She felt imposed upon, for some reason. She almost wished she hadn’t answered the phone.

  “Please say yes,” he told her. “Mom’s worried you’ll think she always drops hams on her guests’ shoes.”

  So she laughed and said, “Well, all right.”

  She was sorry, though, the minute she hung up. What did she imagine she was doing?

  And she didn’t have an inkling what to wear. First she put on something that would have been suitable for church—a beige shirtwaist, conservative—but at the last minute she switched to an embroidered peasant dress with a drawstring neckline because Joe had once asked admiringly if she were of Swedish descent. (She wasn’t.) The skirt was very full and she realized, too late to change yet again, that it made her hips look even wider than they were. “She has such a pretty face,” she imagined Mrs. Davitch saying behind her back, with the rest of the remark understood: It’s a pity she’s so heavy.

  The car she drove was her roommate’s—a Volkswagen Beetle. She had told her roommate she was going to dinner with the family of a friend. “Family friends,” it might have sounded like. (None of her girlfriends knew about Joe. She had not confided in anyone; she didn’t want to give him, oh, meaning. Importance.) She propped the directions on the passenger seat, although she felt fairly confident about finding the Open Arms a second time, and she drove with the radio off, both hands clasping the wheel, her expression calm and impassive. It was all right to be doing this. She was completely blameless. The Davitches honestly, truly were just the family of a friend.

  Joe was the one who answered the doorbell, but his mother was right behind him. “Welcome, honey!” she cried, and she pressed her soft cheek to Rebecca’s. Her hair was set in finger waves so crisp they made a sizzling sound. “And happy birthday!” she added.

  Rebecca said, “Birthday?”

  “Oh, I know it’s not till Saturday, but we’re generally booked on Saturdays so Thursdays are when we always have our family celebrations.”

  Rebecca looked at Joe, who was grinning. “I peeked at your driver’s license,” he said. “The seventh of May. You’ll be twenty.”

  Had he also seen what she weighed? was her immediate thought.

  “When I turned twenty I already had a two-year-old,” Mrs. Davitch said. “But I don’t know; young women nowadays are more focused on careers, I’m afraid.”

  This time the Open Arms seemed less grand, perhaps because there was no crush of guests to hide the flaws. The floorboards creaked under Rebecca’s feet, and the couch in the front parlor had a slumped and burdened look, and the crystal chandeliers were dull with dust. Draped across the mantel was a pale-blue satin swag reading BIRTHDAY GREETINGS in silver spangles, some of which had flaked off to glitter o
n the hearth below. Rebecca said, “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” but Mrs. Davitch said, “Anything for you, dear one!”

  Rebecca had the same eerie feeling that Joe’s fond smile often gave her. Did this woman know her from somewhere?

  Then here came the kid brother, bounding into the room like a puppy. Zeb? Yes, that was his name. Wearing a suit too short in the sleeves and a clumsily knotted tie. Before he could shake her hand—while he was stumbling over the rug on his way to greet her—the front door flew open with a slamming sound. “It’s only us!” a woman trilled. A heavily rouged, brassy blonde in a fluid black jersey dress, and a gray-haired man with a handlebar mustache. The man was unexpectedly familiar. He had passed the hors d’oeuvres at Amy’s party, Rebecca realized; only then he’d been wearing a waiter’s white coat and now he was in a maroon smoking jacket with quilted lapels. “Meet Aunt Joyce,” Joe told Rebecca, “and Poppy, my uncle. Folks, this is Rebecca.”

  “Look at you!” Aunt Joyce said, hugging her tightly. “You’re every bit as pretty as Joe told us!” She stepped back to pat her husband’s shoulder. “Poppy here is Joe’s father’s brother; I don’t know if you know. He and Joe’s father were identical twins, so if you want to see what Joe’s father looked like—”

  “Well, I’m planning to show her the album after dinner,” Mrs. Davitch said. “Would you believe I’ve finally brought that album up to date? I spent half this afternoon pasting pictures in, just so Beck could get to know the family.”

  Rebecca (who had never been called Beck in her life, or any other nickname) felt a combination of pleasure and panic. This situation seemed to be rushing on without her—Zeb saying, “Geez, Mom, you’re not going to show her those old photos! They’re so embarrassing!” while Poppy told Aunt Joyce, “Number one, we were not identical twins; we were fraternal. And number two, we looked nothing alike. Nothing whatsoever.”

  “Oh, lovey, you just don’t want to admit you aren’t unique,” Aunt Joyce said. “Get used to it! How about you?” she asked Rebecca. “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

  “Well, no—”

  “Isn’t that a coincidence!” Mrs. Davitch broke in. “Joe was very nearly an only child too. I couldn’t get pregnant again for ages no matter how hard I tried, which explains why I have one son thirty-three and another just barely sixteen.”

  “Great, Mom,” Zeb groaned. “Let her know how old I am, why don’t you.”

  “Well, it’s not a state secret, Zeb. Poppy, could you pass the dip around? I’m going to check on dinner.”

  “Why doesn’t Zeb pass the dip?” Aunt Joyce asked Mrs. Davitch. “Poppy’s not on duty tonight.”

  “I didn’t say he was, did I? I only asked if he’d help.”

  “Be glad to,” Poppy told her, bending for the tray on the coffee table. But Aunt Joyce seized his arm and then wheeled on Mrs. Davitch to say, “Just because he fills in sometimes in a pinch doesn’t mean he has to spend a family night waiting tables, Liddy Davitch.”

  “Now, Joycie,” Poppy began, while Mrs. Davitch’s chin started wobbling and she said, “Oh, that’s so unfair of you!”

  “Would you ask your doctor to check your appendix if you met him socially?”

  “That is so uncalled for!”

  “I’ll just pass it myself, why don’t I?” Rebecca suggested, and she stepped between the two women to lift the tray. (Celery sticks and carrot sticks that had been sliced too far ahead of time, from the looks of them, with a bowl of sour-cream-and-onion-soup-mix dip at the center.) “Have some,” she told Zeb, who happened to be standing practically on top of her. Zeb seized a carrot stick, dropped it, and stooped to retrieve it. “Joe?” she said. “Celery? Carrots?”

  “Thanks,” he told her, but he stood smiling down at her without taking a thing. Rebecca flushed and moved on, finally.

  Mrs. Davitch said, “Well, aren’t you nice.” She dabbed beneath her eyes with her index fingers and gave Rebecca a watery smile. Then Poppy asked, “Drinks, everybody?” and went over to the cocktail cart. This time, Aunt Joyce raised no objection.

  Within the next half hour, several more people arrived—two male cousins, another uncle, and a middle-aged woman named Iris, her relationship to the others never specified. Each of them walked in without knocking, slamming the front door into the closet door, and each seemed to know all about Rebecca. “Did you find a summer job yet?” one of the cousins asked, and Iris said, “I majored in history, too; I expect Joe will have mentioned.” They filled the rear parlor, the women perching on the very edge of the couch with their knees set all at the same angle like a chorus line; and they talked about people Rebecca didn’t know, but they kept sending her complicitous smiles so that she felt included.

  Dinner, when it was finally served (much too late, after some apparent crisis in the kitchen) was roast beef and mashed potatoes and salad. The roast was dry, the potatoes lumpy, the salad leaves transparent with store-bought dressing. Mrs. Davitch acknowledged all this with a moaning sort of laugh, but her guests said everything was fine. They spent most of the meal arguing about another cousin—an absent cousin—who either had or had not said something rude to Mrs. Davitch about her husband’s death. Mrs. Davitch was of the opinion that his remark had been very hurtful, but Aunt Joyce pointed out that suicide was suicide and she might as well face up to the fact. Mrs. Davitch set her fork down and covered her eyes with one hand.

  Rebecca hadn’t known that Joe’s father was a suicide. She looked across the table at Joe, but he appeared to be concentrating on his meal.

  Dessert was a chocolate layer cake blazing with twenty candles, the top layer slightly askew and held in place with toothpicks. For that, the little girls were summoned from upstairs—all three in pajamas and squinting crossly from an evening of watching TV in the dark. “Give Beck a birthday kiss, now,” Aunt Joyce ordered, and they hung back at first but eventually obeyed, each leaving a tiny star of dampness on Rebecca’s cheek. Then everybody sang “Happy Birthday,” while Rebecca gazed around the table and pretended that she belonged here—that she was the much-loved member of a large and boisterous family, just as she had yearned to be when she was a child.

  Later all the adults settled once more in the parlor, and Mrs. Davitch laid the photo album across Rebecca’s knees so that everyone could explain just who was who. Here was Mrs. Davitch herself, unrecognizably girlish in flared khaki shorts from the forties. Here was Mr. Davitch, with Joe’s broad smile but, yes, perhaps a slightly shadowed look around the eyes. Here was baby Zeb chewing on a teething ring, and here a teenaged Joe—nudge, nudge—in a very loud houndstooth sports coat with shoulders sharp as wings. No attempt had been made at chronological order: the present-day Aunt Joyce, overblown and dumpy, was followed by Aunt Joyce in a willowy, wasp-waisted bridal gown. And there wasn’t a sign of Joe’s ex-wife, although several shots of his children had had someone scissored out of them.

  Rebecca sat very straight-backed, and she refrained from touching a picture even when asking a question about it. She didn’t want anyone to think that she was presuming. She knew she was a guest here, she meant. She knew these colorful relatives weren’t hers.

  But when Joe walked her out to the car at the end of the evening, he said, “Everybody felt you were like a member of the family. You fit right in, they told me.”

  “Well, they were very hospitable,” she said.

  “They think I ought to marry you.”

  “What?”

  “I’d told them ahead that I wanted to.”

  She stopped at the curb and turned to him. “Joe—” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  All at once she grew conscious of the stillness of the evening, the absence of any traffic, the hushing sound of new leaves on the little tree beside them. When he took a step toward her, she thought he meant to kiss her, and she knew she would kiss him back. Instead, though, he slowly, solemnly, carefully tied the drawstring at her neckline.

  Why did that make her k
nees go limp?

  She gave a shaky laugh and turned to get into her car. “Well,” she said, “thanks for dinner. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  He closed her door so gently behind her that she thought at first it wasn’t latched. But it was.

  * * *

  Friday, there was no word of him. Well, thank goodness. Friday evening she and Will went to the movies. Saturday they shared a pizza for her birthday, and Will gave her a locket with his photograph inside. She kept thinking Joe would pop up somewhere. She walked self-consciously, keeping her head high. But he never appeared.

  Sunday, Will’s mother and Rebecca’s met them for brunch at Myrtle’s Family Restaurant. It was a tradition, once a month or so, since Macadam was an easy drive from Church Valley. At the end of the meal, Rebecca’s mother said it was her turn to pay. The bill was not very large, but Rebecca felt a pang when her mother pulled her worn cloth coin purse from her pocketbook. Later, as they were walking back to campus, Rebecca asked Will, “Why don’t we ever pay for brunch?”

  “Oh, well, you know how our moms like to give us a little treat,” he said.

  It was the word moms that got her—that weak and childish word falling from his lips. “Oh,” she said, “I’m so sick of this eternal . . . studentness! Each thing in its own time, every stage of our lives waiting for the proper, reasonable moment!”