Back When We Were Grownups (2 page)

The first to reach them was Barry. He pounded up shouting, “Peter! Peter? What in hell were you
doing
?” Peter didn’t answer. He was shaking and chattering, huddling into himself on the ground. Barry peeled his own windbreaker off and bundled it around him. Meanwhile Zeb arrived—Rebecca’s brother-in-law. He was followed by the children and then by the rest of the grownups, who slowed to a casual saunter once they saw that things were under control.

Zeb was a pediatrician; so Barry and Rebecca gave way to him. He squatted and asked, “Are you okay?” and Peter nodded, swiping at his nose with a sleeve of his father’s windbreaker. “He’s okay,” Zeb announced.

Well, a layman could have done that much. “Check his lungs,” Rebecca ordered.

“His lungs are fine,” Zeb said, but he went on watching Peter. “How did it happen, son?” he asked.

Rebecca tensed, dreading the answer, but Peter kept silent. You couldn’t tell a thing from his expression: eyes lowered, mouth pursed in a stubborn little bunch. Even before his dunking, he had had the skinned appearance of a wet cat, and now she could make out the pink of his scalp beneath his colorless hair. Periodically he swiped at his nose again in a fractious way, as if a gnat were pestering him.

“Well,” Zeb said finally, and he sighed and rose to his feet. He was a gangling, bespectacled, kind-faced man, so accustomed to dealing with the children of the inner-city poor that he wore a permanent look of resignation. “Let’s rustle up some dry clothes for these two,” he said. “Come on, everybody. Fun’s over.”

As they were heading back toward the picnic—Rebecca hugging her rib cage and doing her best to stop her shivers—Barry came up beside her. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you, Mrs., er, Beck,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “goodness! I’m sure he would have grabbed on to a branch or something, eventually.”

“Well, still: I appreciate your coming to the rescue.”

For now he did, she thought. But wait till he found out that Peter never would have fallen in if not for her.

*  *  *

They didn’t continue the ball game. There was talk of going home early, even; and for once, Rebecca let them argue without intervening. She sat quietly at the picnic table, cocooned in a leaf-littered blanket, while they hashed it out among themselves. Look at how blue Peter’s lips were, several of the women said. He would catch his death of cold! But of course, the grandchildren wanted to stay, and the uncle—an energy miser—pointed out the waste of gas if they had driven all this way only to turn around and drive back. “Let’s just eat, for mercy’s sake,” he said. Biddy, who had gone to a lot of trouble over the food, jumped up as if that settled things and started unpacking coolers.

By this time, Rebecca’s hair had dried into its usual pup-tent shape and her blouse had changed from an icy film to a warm, damp second skin beneath her blanket. She repositioned the blanket around her waist and accepted the loan of Zeb’s cardigan. Peter fared better: from the back seats and floors of various vehicles, an entire outfit was assembled. Emmy donated a sweatshirt, Danny a pair of striped baseball knickers, and Jeep two semi-white gym socks. Ignoring the curious stares of the other children, Peter stripped then and there, exposing tweaky pale dots of nipples and dingy, stretched-out underpants fraying at the edges. (This was what happened, Rebecca reflected, when a father had sole custody.) Everything was too big for him. Even Danny’s knickers—and Danny was barely thirteen—hung off him in folds, clinging to him only where the wet underpants had soaked through.

It struck Rebecca as unusual that a boy that old didn’t mind changing clothes in public. And there was something needful and nudging about the way he stayed so close to his father. Once they were settled on NoNo’s blanket, he kept interrupting the conversation by plucking Barry’s sleeve and whispering at length in his ear, as if he were not just small for his age but young for his age, too.

“Is that child all
right
?” she asked Zeb.

“Oh, sure. Just bashful, I suspect,” he told her.

But a big part of Zeb’s profession was soothing parents’ anxieties; so she turned to Biddy. “I haven’t heard him say a word to NoNo,” she said. “I hope there isn’t going to be some kind of stepmother problem.”

Biddy said, “Well, at least he was playing with the other kids by the river. That’s always a good sign.”

“He wouldn’t talk to us, though,” one of the children spoke up.

This was Emmy, a long-legged sprite pouring lemonade from a thermos. Rebecca hadn’t realized she was listening. Hastily, she said, “Well, of course he wouldn’t talk! Imagine meeting all of you at once! I bet he talks your ears off as soon as he feels more at home.”

“He wasn’t really playing, either. He was only, like, hanging around our edges.”

Rebecca said, “Maybe I should give him a welcoming party. You know? The way I do for our new babies? I could, oh, set up a scavenger hunt! And all the clues could be Davitch-related, I mean things he would have to ask the other kids to—”

“He would hate it,” Emmy said flatly.

Rebecca slumped in her seat.

Biddy was uncovering a tray of runny cheeses garnished with edible flowers, and a mosaic of tiny canapés studded with salmon roe, and a sunburst of snow peas filled with smoked trout and dill. Two days a week, Biddy worked as a nutritionist for a retirement community (her monthly newsletter,
What Kind of Wine Goes with Oatmeal?,
had been mentioned in the
Baltimore Sun
), but she dreamed of becoming a gourmet chef, and it showed. “Ew, what’s this?” the children were forever asking, pointing to something stuffed or sculptured or wonton-encased or otherwise disguised; and today they were all the more distressed because meaty, smoky smells had started drifting down the river from somebody else’s grill. “Can’t we ever have hamburgers?” Joey asked.

Rebecca said, “You can get hamburgers any old place! It’s only at a Davitch party you can try these, um . . . these, um . . .”

She was looking at a platter of pastry thimbles filled with what seemed to be mud. Biddy said, “Snails in phyllo cups.”

Joey said, “Ew!”

“I
beg
your pardon—” Biddy began, but then Rebecca grabbed Joey around the waist and pulled him close and nuzzled his neck. “Such a persnickety,” she teased him, “such a hoity-toity,” while he squirmed and giggled. He smelled of fresh sweat and sunshine. “Gram!” he protested, and she released him, and he went careening off toward his cousins.

“That child needs to be taught some manners,” Biddy said. “Poppy? Care for a snail?” she asked her great-uncle.

Poppy was seated on the other side of the picnic table, folding both hands on his cane and hunching forward all hungry and hopeful, but he drew back sharply and, “Oh,” he said, “why, ah, not just now, I don’t believe, thank you just the same.”

Biddy sighed. “I don’t know why I bother,” she told Rebecca. “Why not just grill a batch of hot dogs, or set out a loaf of store-bought bread and a jar of peanut butter?”

Why not, in fact? Rebecca wanted to ask. It wasn’t as if Biddy were catering to her own tastes, because Biddy didn’t eat. She was painfully, unattractively thin, every vertebra visible down the back of her neck, even her short black ponytail skimped and stringy, her wide-legged slacks and long red sweater all but empty. Offer her a bite and she’d say, “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly,” and yet she talked about food nonstop, read cookbooks the way other women read romance novels, pored over magazine photos featuring glossy, lacy salads and succulent pork roasts. “Call people to the table,” she told Rebecca now. “Everything’s drying out! Make them come!”—as if she herself could not be heard; as if the food were her only means of communication.

Obediently, Rebecca stood up. (She knew from long experience that this family had to be corralled; a simple shout never worked.) “Children!” she called, wading through knee-high weeds. “Lunch is on!” Her shoes were squelching wetly, and her blanket started collecting a fuzz of burrs and pollen. “Lunch, Troy! Lunch, Hakim! Come eat, everybody!”

She should wear a whistle around her neck for these occasions. She always threatened to do that, but then forgot until next time.

Patch and Jeep seemed to be having an argument. Or Patch was arguing; Jeep was just kicking the ground with one huge, cloddish running shoe, his fists stuffed in his rear pockets and his eyes on the trees in the distance. “Lunch, you two!” Rebecca sang out. She scooped up the youngest grandchild but then was thrown off balance, and her blanket sarong hobbled her so that they both fell, laughing, into a clump of sprinkly white flowers. Rebecca’s daughter said, “Honestly, Mom!” and helped them to their feet.

“Sorry,” Rebecca said, chastened.

Once she had been the most serene and dignified young woman. That thought came to her, suddenly. She had worn her hair in a crown of braids, and friends had complimented her on the level way she carried her head, which had made her broad figure seem almost regal. Queen Rebecca, her roommate had called her.

Well, that was all in the past now.

By the time she got back to the picnic table, Poppy had started in on the least smelly of the cheeses. “Wait, Poppy!” she told him. “We haven’t drunk the toast yet!”

“Who knows whether I’ll live that long?” he asked crossly, but he set down his knife. He was one of those old men who appear to curl up as they age, and his chin was practically resting on the table.

Biddy was constructing a still life of exotic fruits—kiwis and mangoes and papayas and something that looked like green hand grenades. “How pretty!” Rebecca told her, although she was fairly certain that no one would venture to eat any. She reached past Biddy for a bottle of champagne and handed it to Barry. “Could you please open this?” she asked him. (Always give guests some useful task, if you want them to feel a part of things.) Another bottle went to Zeb, and she put Patch to work unpacking the old-fashioned, shallow sherbet glasses that the Davitches still used for champagne.

“Why you bring real crystal to family picnics—” Patch began, but Rebecca said, “What better occasion, I ask you, than for my nearest and dearest?”

“Half will be in splinters before we leave here; mark my words,” Patch told her.

She was still upset about the engagement, Rebecca decided. It wasn’t like Patch to care if the stemware got broken. She wrapped an arm around Patch’s shoulders and whispered, “Sweetie, things will work out. We have to trust NoNo’s judgment! She must know what she’s doing.”

Unfortunately, just at that moment Barry’s cell phone rang. He pulled it from a holster on his belt and said, “Hello?” Patch gave Rebecca a meaningful stare. Rebecca just smiled noncommittally and sat back down at the table.

The children were complaining about their portions of champagne. They believed they should be given as much as the grownups, but what did they get? A tiny drop each, barely a swallow. “Once you’re legal drinking age—” Rebecca told them.

“You always let Dixon have a full glass, and he’s not legal drinking age!”

“Well, Dixon’s older than the rest of you, and besides, eighteen
used
to be legal.”

Jeep didn’t like what he’d been served, either; he preferred beer. “Didn’t we bring a six-pack?” he asked. “Where’s that six-pack? Geez, Patch, you know how champagne makes me burp,” and he started rummaging through ice chests.

Then Poppy took it into his head to start reciting his poem. “
You’re given a special welcome when you get to heaven late,
” he declaimed in a ringing voice.

This was the poem he’d written for his wife’s funeral, all of thirty years ago, and he never missed a chance to quote it. As often as Rebecca had heard that opening line, she mistook it every time for a reference to the Davitches’ tendency toward tardiness. So like them to be unpunctual even in death! she always thought. Although the second line dispelled that notion. “
When you’re the one who’s been left behind to mourn,
” Poppy went on, rolling his
r
’s.

“Yes, but, Poppy,” Rebecca said gently, and she reached across the table for his hand. “This is actually more of a
joyous
occasion, you know?”

He glared at her, but he subsided. His hand had a light, hollow feel, like a dried-up locust shell, and it lay in hers without moving.

Oh, none of the others considered how every engagement on earth would have to end up, Rebecca thought. They glided right over “till death do us part.”

But she squared her shoulders, and, “So!” she cried. “Barry, NoNo, tell us how you met! This has all been such a surprise!”

Barry was just replacing his phone in its holster. He looked over at NoNo, and she slipped both hands through the crook of his arm and smiled up at him. “Well,” she began, in her scratchy little voice, “you know how I’ve always had the gift of second sight.”

Her sisters nodded, but a couple of the men were heard to groan.

“Well, I’m standing in my shop one morning, and in walks Barry. Says he wants a dozen roses. ‘Fine,’ I say, and I turn to get them, and all at once, out of the corner of my eye, I see the strangest thing. I see me, standing next to him, and I’m wearing a white chiffon wedding dress and holding a bouquet of late-summer blooms in various shades of yellow and gold—calendulas and rudbeckia and cosmos and gerbera daisies.”

Rebecca supposed it was only natural that NoNo should focus most specifically on the flowers, but even so, she couldn’t help laughing. The others looked at her. “Sorry,” she said.

“And then,” NoNo went on, “I blink and he’s alone again. Waiting at the counter and wondering what the delay is, no doubt. So I go get the roses, I bring them out, I wrap them, and all the time I’m thinking
madly
. Madly. And finally I say, ‘What would you like me to put on the card?’ Which is not the usual thing, of course. Usually when a customer comes in person, he doesn’t bother with a card. Or if he does, he writes the message himself. But I was afraid he was married or something. I wanted to see who the roses were meant for.”

“Only,
I
didn’t know that wasn’t the usual thing,” Barry said. “I told her, ‘Just write,
For Mamie with love.
’”