Back When We Were Grownups (3 page)

“And I said, ‘Who is Mamie?’”

Patch stopped handing out napkins. “You didn’t,” she said.

“I did! I was brazen! And Barry said, ‘Mamie’s my secretary.’ See, it happened to be Professional Secretaries Day.”

“You send flowers to your secretary with
love
?” Patch asked Barry.

He shrugged. “It’s just an expression,” he said.

Patch looked at him a moment longer and then went back to her napkins, shaking her head.

But NoNo was oblivious. “In the meantime,” she told the others, “he is taking money from his wallet, and I am thinking, Shoot, he’s paying cash! I won’t find out his name! So I write on the card,
For Mamie with love, from your boss and from Elinor Davitch, who would like to get to know him better.
”

Patch sent a despairing glance toward the sky.

“Wasn’t that smart?” Barry asked, beaming down at NoNo. “She figured Mamie would ask me, ‘Who’s this Elinor Davitch?’ Which she did, sure enough. And I said, ‘Who is
who
?’ and Mamie showed me the card. I said, ‘Well, I never! It must be that woman at Budding Genius.’ And I went back there after work and asked if she’d have a drink with me.”

“We hit it off immediately,” NoNo said. “I knew we would. Have I ever been wrong? Remember that time I saw a big, huge belly on Patch when she was trying to get pregnant? Remember when I asked Dixon why he was wearing a Johns Hopkins T-shirt? He said, ‘This is a Camp Fernwood T-shirt, Aunt NoNo, but I wish it
were
Johns Hopkins because Hopkins is my first-choice college.’ And I didn’t even know it! Nobody’d told me a thing!”

Patch was shaking her head again. “Ridiculous,” she said in an undertone to Rebecca.

Rebecca said, “Well, she does have this uncanny way of—”

“Not that, Beck. Although how uncanny could it be, when she fulfilled her own prophecy by immediately writing that note, for Lord’s sake? But do you happen to have any idea when Secretaries Day
is
?”

Rebecca said, “Um . . .”

“It’s in April.”

“April,” Rebecca said, still not comprehending.

“That was barely two months ago! Or less; more like one month, because I think it’s toward the tail end of April. NoNo’s known this man just a month and now she’s up and marrying him!”

Rebecca started to remind her that she wasn’t marrying him till August, after all. But in the lull that had suddenly fallen—with the only sounds the distant river and the chirring of the insects—she worried NoNo was overhearing their conversation. So instead, she picked up a glass of champagne. “Time for our toast, everybody!” she cried.

One by one, they reached for glasses of their own. The children were the most enthusiastic. They raised theirs high above their heads, like people hailing taxicabs. The only exception was Peter, who sat on NoNo’s blanket in a puddle of heather-gray sweatshirt and allowed his glass to dangle limply from one hand.

Rebecca drew in a deep breath and began:

“A toast to the bunch of us gathered together

In this glorious spring weather,

And to Zeb for scoping out the site

And Biddy for cooking with all her might.”

Her rhyming toasts were a tradition. She had no illusions about their literary merit; she knew they were pure doggerel. (More than once, in a pinch, she’d been forced to rely on nonsense syllables—
tra la la
or
tum dee diddle
—to finish up a line.) But her family had come to expect them; so she took another breath and went on.

“And most of all, to NoNo and Barry.

We’re so delighted they’re planning to marry.”

“Hear, hear,” the others murmured.

Joey’s glass had a bee on the rim and there was a little to-do, since Joey was deathly allergic; but eventually they did all manage to take their sips. Then Barry said, “Well, thanks, you guys,” and sheepishly rubbed the top of his bristly blond crew cut.

That was the best he could do?

Oh, Rebecca always felt suspicious of the people that her loved ones fell in love with. She worried! She couldn’t help it! But that was her deep, dark secret, because invariably she was the first to rush forward with a warm welcome. Now she raised her glass again. “And next!” she said.

“Next, a toast to Peter!

Someone new in our family!

Nothing could be sweeter.”

“Hear, hear!” they repeated, more loudly now, and Barry said, “Aww,” and raised his glass to Rebecca. “That’s very nice of you,” he told her.

But Peter said, “
I’m
not in your family.”

His speaking voice turned out to be high and thin and childish, but it managed to silence everybody.

“I’ve already got a family!” he said.

Rebecca said, “I didn’t mean—I’m sorry! I honestly didn’t mean—”

Peter scrambled to his feet, tossing aside his glass. (It sent out a spray of bright drops before it landed, intact, on the blanket.) His floppy borrowed socks nearly tripped him up, but he righted himself and started running.

Not toward the river, thank goodness. He seemed headed for Barry’s car, although it was difficult to be sure. Rebecca, rising from her bench with her fingers pressed to her lips, thought he resembled one of those charred paper bits that float above a bonfire, gray and weightless, fluttering without aim. As he neared the car he glanced over his shoulder, and when he found Barry ambling behind at a nonchalant pace, he veered to the left without slowing down. In front of him was a green thicket. He plunged directly into it.

“Stop him,” Zeb said suddenly.

Everybody looked at him.

“He’s going toward where the river bends! He’s headed for the water,” Zeb said, and he set off at a lope. “Barry!” he called. “Stop him! He’s about to get wet all over again!”

Barry gathered speed.

Peter entered the thicket and vanished.

A moment later, Barry vanished too.

And that is when the first intimation came to Rebecca from nowhere, brushing across her mind like the most delicate of moth wings.

How on earth did I get like this? How? How did I ever become this person who’s not really me?

Two

T
hat 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
dong
s. 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, just 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.”