Back When We Were Grownups (11 page)

She would go in for a conference and nod and look concerned, and then try not to show her pleasure when the teacher finished up by saying, “Apart from that, of course, your son is a real joy. None of my other students is as bright or creative as Tristram.”

“Yes, well, he’s always been very . . .” she would murmur. With her eyes modestly lowered.

In high school his sole companion would be a boy obsessed with computers. The two would spend whole weekends shut up in Tristram’s room, constructing something incomprehensible out of electrical wire and a disemboweled television set. She would knock and offer cookies; Tristram would say, “Huh? Oh. Thanks.” Then she would stand in his doorway a while breathing in the smells of machine oil and sweaty sneakers. It wouldn’t bother her a bit that he paid her no attention. She knew he had reached the stage where he had to start pulling away from her.

She knew that underneath, he would always love her.

“Hand me them corn ears, will you?” Alice Farmer said. “Miz Davitch? Pot’s on the boil. Could you please hand me the corn?”

Rebecca merely blinked at her.

*  *  *

There were so many people at dinner that the children had to eat separately. This caused several different arguments, because some of the children—the ones in their teens—felt they were old enough to eat with the grownups. And it didn’t help a bit that Tina kept saying, “Of course you’re old enough! Come sit next to me.” Rebecca had to step in, finally. “Tina,” she said, “this table seats twelve, and that’s how many adults we have. I’m putting all seven of the children in the kitchen.”

Tina shrugged and gave the teenagers a pouchy-lipped look of commiseration. Then she patted the chair to her right and said, “Oh, well, Barry,
you
sit next to me, then. And Hakim on my other side.” (The two best-looking men in the room, wouldn’t you know.) “Seven grandchildren!” she told Rebecca. “You and I could practically start a baseball team!”

Half of Rebecca felt flattered; there was a certain confiding, intimate quality to Tina that she always found seductive. But the other half wanted to point out that Tina had no right at all to claim Min Foo’s two children. She gave her a bland smile and then deliberately seated herself between her own favorites, Troy and Zeb, although her usual spot was next to Poppy. Poppy was down near the end, repeatedly asking if someone would please turn off the lights in the parlor. Nobody volunteered, though. They were all vying for Tina’s attention, the girls addressing her as “Mother” more often than was needed, forming their lips around the word in a self-conscious and unskilled manner.

It was pathetic to recollect that once, when Rebecca was first married, she had suggested to the girls that they call her “Mom.” “But you’re not our mom,” they had said. “That would be a lie.” Oh, children were such sticklers for the absolute, literal truth. (The other day, introducing Peter to the plumber, Rebecca had said, “Meet my future stepdaughter’s stepson; I mean my stepdaughter’s future stepson. My stepgrandson-to-be, I mean.” Mr. Burdick’s eyes had widened. No doubt he’d thought her unwelcoming, not to simply call the boy her grandson. But Rebecca knew from experience that Peter might all too well have contradicted her outright and made her look like a fraud.)

Alice Farmer sailed in, stately and important, holding a platter of crab cakes high above her head. “Why, Alice,” Tina said. “Are you still with us.” This gave Rebecca a twist of wicked satisfaction, because Alice Farmer hated being addressed by anything but her whole name. It was one of her quirks. Alice Farmer set the platter in front of Rebecca and sent Tina a long, flat stare beneath half-shuttered lids before she left the room.

“If I were Tina, I’d hire myself a taster before the next course,” Zeb murmured out of the side of his mouth. But Tina had blithely moved on, by now, to the subject of the wedding. She was asking Barry how he and NoNo had met, where he had proposed, what kind of ceremony they planned. Her questions were delivered with that falling intonation that the English use—“Won’t it be dreadfully
hot
in the garden”—and at some stage during her years abroad she seemed to have lost the knack of pronouncing her
r
’s. “God-den,” was what she said. Rebecca resolved to stop being so critical. “Could I offer you a crab cake,” she asked Troy, but unfortunately the question came out with that same downward note at the end. Troy gave a sputter of a laugh. Rebecca plopped a crab cake onto his plate, pointedly avoiding his eyes.

“We’ve finally found a minister,” Barry was telling Tina. “NoNo and I were in a restaurant the other night, talking about who we could get to marry us, and our waitress said, ‘Why, I could do that.’ Turns out she has some kind of certificate she sent away for through the mail. Perfectly legal, she says. A really nice lady. Says she’ll do it for free.”

This was news to Rebecca. All she’d heard was that the officiator would be a woman. She had pictured someone magisterial, wearing a flowing black robe like Sandra What’s-It on the Supreme Court bench. Now a whole new image popped up: a person in a dingy pink nylon uniform and a hairnet.

“Well, and why not,” Tina said cheerfully. “It’s all a big charade, anyhow. Isn’t it,” she asked Hakim. He gave her a dazzled smile. “Just a primitive tribal ritual,” she went on, “meant to make us forget we’re merely propagating the species. When I think what I could have accomplished if I hadn’t bothered with marriage! It’s enough to make me weep.”

“What,” Zeb said politely.

“Pardon?”

“What could you have accomplished?”

“Well, you’ll have to ask my voice teacher that. She was devastated when I married Joe. Absolutely devastated. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you are throwing away a God-given talent, purely to enter an institution invented by males for their own benefit.’ And she was right; I know that now. Oh,” she said, turning a radiant smile on Hakim, “women may find marriage useful during that little childbearing phase. But then as the years go by, they need their husbands less and less while their husbands need them more and more. Men expect all that listening and marveling and yes-darling-aren’t-you-amazing, those balanced meals and clean sheets and waxed floors, and then the blood-pressure monitoring and the low-sodium diet, and the hand-holding when they retire and can’t think what to do with themselves. And the wives, meanwhile, start longing to get free. They start running off to their ladies’ luncheons and their women’s book-club meetings and their girls-only wilderness trips.”

“Great, Tina,” Zeb said. “You certainly know the right thing to say to a bridal couple.”

The others laughed—some a bit uncertainly, Rebecca thought. But Tina lifted her chin and told him, “I don’t notice
you’ve
been in any rush to marry.”

“No, I guess I haven’t,” he said. “I’m still waiting for Rebecca.”

Rebecca sent him a grateful smile, but Tina did not appear to have heard. “Seriously, though,” she told the others. “You have to admit that love is a waste. It’s expensive, it’s inconvenient, it’s time-consuming, it’s messy . . .”

They laughed again, more easily now. They must have decided she was joking. That Tina: such a card.

But Rebecca didn’t think she was joking. Or not entirely. She suspected Tina was expressing exactly what she felt.

The funny thing was that she felt that way herself, at certain moments. She gazed around her at this tangle of relatives and in-laws, the children tumbling in from the kitchen to complain about some injustice, Poppy announcing his birthday party for the thousandth time, Peter slouching wretchedly on the fringes of the group . . .

And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren’t for love.

*  *  *

Phone photographer,
she reminded herself before she went to sleep.
Phone NoNo to ask what music she wants. Pick up Poppy’s suit from the cleaner.

She knew she should switch on the lamp and make a list, but she was too tired. Instead, she tried to envision the list on the ceiling above her bed—a mnemonic device that never really worked.
Ask Dixon if he could drive Alice Farmer home after the wedding,
she added. She slid her left foot to a cooler spot on the sheet.
Find out whether Barry . . .

Then she lost track of her thoughts and lay staring into the dark.

It made her might-have-been existence more real to imagine also the negatives. Will, for instance, would probably have been a workaholic. He was just the type to stay late at the lab and converse in monosyllables when his mind was on his research. There she’d be, serving him a gourmet dinner, wearing something enticing, brushing the back of his neck with her fingers as she poured his wine, and he would say, “You know? I think I’ve figured out where I went wrong in that last experiment.”

As for Tristram: he would never quite outgrow his social ineptness. She and Will would always worry about him a little. Although professionally he would be very successful, doing something scientific that she couldn’t pretend to understand, she didn’t suppose he would marry till relatively late. He tended to develop inappropriate crushes on shallow, bubbly blondes who didn’t return his interest. (You had to be able to see beyond his earnest, shy, fumbling manner.) Like his father, he would seem a bit removed from his own culture.

Oh, it wasn’t always easy, Rebecca would tell her friends.

*  *  *

“I can’t believe you’re going to let Poppy give a toast at the wedding,” Tina said. “He’s not in earshot, is he.”

“No, he’s up in his room,” Rebecca told her. “He had breakfast hours ago.”

She was hoping to make a point—it was after 9 a.m.—but Tina let it pass right over her head. “The man’s a total loss!” she said. “He seems to have about one-sixteenth of his mind left, every cell of it devoted to the savoring of sweets.”

Rebecca had never heard anyone use the word
savoring
in casual conversation. She wondered if Tina would spell it in the British way, with an
our
. She spent so long considering this—standing at the kitchen stove, watching a pat of butter melt and begin to sizzle—that Tina gave a cluck of impatience and reached past her for the egg carton. “My God, it’s some kind of cruel joke,” she said when she had lifted the lid. She was looking down at a double row of eggshells. Rebecca always put the shells back in the carton when she was cooking. In fact, she’d assumed that everyone did. This was what happened when people came to stay: they forced you to view your life from outside, to realize that there was, come to think of it, something faintly mocking about a carton full of empty shells. But two eggs remained intact, and she plucked those out and rapped them against the rim of the skillet.

“As for that birthday party,” Tina said, “I don’t know how you can even consider it! He’d forget you’d thrown it, anyway, half a minute later. And think of the conversation: round and round, the same subjects over and over. All his guests would go mad.”

Rebecca, too, suspected that Poppy might not remember the party afterward. Her hard work would come to nothing. But she said, “That’s okay; we’ll remind him.”

“Simpler just not to do it and tell him you had.”

“Also,” Rebecca said, dreamily stirring the eggs, “it can be kind of interesting when he repeats himself. New details come out, different slants on the old stories. Sometimes I end up learning something.”

“For what
that’s
worth,” Tina said. “He always was a bit of a bore, even when Aunt Joyce was alive; but now, good God! I guess she covered up for him more than we imagined.”

“Well, who knows? Maybe we’d say the same thing in reverse if
he’d
been the one who died,” Rebecca said. “Maybe the two of them together made a unit that worked, and whichever one of them went first would have left the other, oh, just . . . lopsided and lame.”

There was a short silence, during which Rebecca turned off the burner and carried the skillet over to the table. She dished the eggs onto Tina’s plate, set the skillet in the sink, and asked, “Coffee? Tea?”

Only then, turning from the sink, did she notice how intently Tina was studying her. “What,” she said.

Tina said, “Oh, nothing.” She settled at the table, scooping her long skirt beneath her. (Like someone in an old movie, she wore a full-length satin dressing gown to breakfast.) “Coffee, please,” she said. Then she said, “You must have felt sort of lopsided yourself, all these years.”

“Well,” Rebecca said.

“You don’t have any, shall we say, man friend, I suppose.”

“Oh, no,” Rebecca said. She poured a cup of coffee and set it in front of Tina.

“Quite right: why would you want one,” Tina told her. “Such a nuisance, they are.”

This struck Rebecca as unexpectedly kind. She sat down opposite Tina and said, “It isn’t that, exactly—”

“And after baby-sitting Joe Davitch!” Tina said. “No wonder you need a rest. God, the Davitches in general: a bunch of mopers. They could really weigh a person down.”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t—”

“Any time I think of his mother, I picture her on the verge of tears. You know how her chin would pock up. How her lower lip would quiver. It’s ironic that her profession was throwing parties. I mean, just because your house has fourteen-foot ceilings doesn’t automatically make you a social butterfly, does it. I’ll never forget what I heard her tell an old friend once. ‘I like you, Ginny,’ she said, ‘but do we actually have to
get together
?’”

Rebecca smiled, hearing her mother-in-law’s plaintive little voice echoing across the years.

“And Joe’s father taking those pills,” Tina said. “Not even leaving a note behind. There must have been some sort of depressive chromosome or something, descending from both branches.”

“Well, but
sometimes
they were happy,” Rebecca said, because she was thinking, just then, of her twentieth-birthday party, all those people singing to her around the table.

“And then Aunt Alma, his father’s sister,” Tina said, “forever checking into Sheppard Pratt for little rest cures. Or how about Cousin Ed! Walking in front of that bus.”

Rebecca hated it when Tina showed off her inside knowledge of the Davitches. She herself had never heard of Cousin Ed, and she had thought Aunt Alma’s rest cures were a secret that Mother Davitch had confided to her alone. She said, “Yes, but in any family—”