Back When We Were Grownups (4 page)

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 was 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.”

That got their attention, all right. Joey asked, “Are they having a DJ?”

“Certainly a DJ! He’s bringing his own sound system, later this afternoon.”

Joey punched the remote control and a Superman-type figure halted in mid-screen, trembling slightly. Then the two children slid off the couch and followed Rebecca downstairs. Lateesha’s beads sounded like an abacus clicking. (What a jewelry-laden family Min Foo’s was! Especially if you counted Joey’s watch, a black rubber, digital, multi-function affair whose face was about twice the width of his wrist.)

“Biddy is doing the food,” Rebecca said, “and I tried to persuade them to hire NoNo for the flowers, but they said they always use Binstock.”

“
Rich
people,” Joey said.

“Well, yes, I guess they must be.”

They were in the kitchen now. Rebecca started pulling boxes from the cupboard beside the sink. “Look at the decorations I bought,” she told the children. “Little rolled diplomas. Aren’t they cute?”

But Lateesha was more attracted to a string of ancient, yellowing electric lights shaped like tiny wedding bells. “I want these,” she said firmly, and Rebecca said, “Well, but . . .” and then, “Oh, well, why not? We’ll pretend they’re school bells.” She held them up by the cord, which was the old striped, cloth-covered kind that was probably not all that safe. “These were strung across the mantel the first time I ever came here,” she said.

“No, I want them high in the air.”

“Well, we can do that.”

They carried the boxes to the front parlor, and then Rebecca went back for a stepladder. When she returned, Joey was banging out the
Jaws
theme on the piano. “Here,” she told him, opening the ladder. “You climb up and hang the bells on those hooks along the moldings.” Then she gave Lateesha the little diplomas to set around, and she unfolded a crocheted cloth and spread it over the piano to hide all the stains and water rings.

“The first time I ever walked into this room,” she told the children, “the bells were strung across the mantel and there was a kind of pagoda effect, a cupola effect, to the ceiling, from the twists of white crepe paper tied to the chandelier. It was my ex-roommate Amy’s engagement party and her family was making a huge, huge fuss. And I had come alone—I did have a boyfriend, but he was busy that night—and I walked in and I just about walked out again. Well, you know how fancy this place can look when the bald spots are covered up. There were flowers everywhere, white and purple lilacs, so many that the house was kind of shimmering with that heavy, mothball perfume lilacs give off. I was bowled over! And I didn’t know a soul; just Amy. She had transferred to Goucher, you see, after our freshman year at Macadam, and she had this whole set of Goucher girlfriends I had never met. So I was standing there with my mouth open, and Amy didn’t notice me because she was carrying on about her engagement ring—how she had wanted platinum but her fiancé wanted gold because his mother’s ring had been . . . and all at once I realized that the stereo was playing ‘Band of Gold.’ I thought, How appropriate! and I looked over at the DJ, who happened to be Zeb, only of course I didn’t know that. He was just this teenaged kid sitting behind a stereo, grinning straight into my face as if we shared a secret. He’d chosen that song on purpose! It made me laugh. And right at that moment, right while I was laughing, this man came up beside me and said, ‘I see you’re having a wonderful time.’ And that was your grandpa.”

It felt peculiar to refer to Joe as a grandpa. He had died before he turned forty. In Rebecca’s mind he was forever young and handsome, and when she tried to imagine how he would have aged she had to guess from how Zeb had aged: those wide, spare, scarecrow shoulders grown stooped, the tangle of longish black hair threaded with thick strands of gray. Although Zeb lacked Joe’s expansive manner and his grace. He had always been more . . . shambling, you might say.

She lifted the lid of the piano bench and sorted through the sheet music stored inside. Even at these teenaged affairs, some relative just about always ended up playing tunes for the others to sing along with. Songs from the 1950s, swing . . . She propped a folk-song collection on the music rack. She had observed that the sixties were back in favor right now.

“I bet neither one of you have ever heard ‘Band of Gold,’” she told the children.

Joey, perched on the ladder, shook his head. Lateesha just set another diploma on the coffee table. “Well, it’s not as if you’ve missed anything,” Rebecca said. “A simple-minded song; it was out of date even then. With this silly chorus behind it,
baba, bababa
. . . So there I was, laughing away, and your grandpa said, ‘My name’s Joe Davitch; my family owns this house, and that character flirting with you so outrageously is my kid brother, Zeb.’ Which meant I had to tell him
my
name—meanwhile wondering, you know, why he was just standing there and not circulating among the other guests, because at the time I had no idea the Davitches would normally let a party sink or swim on its own. He said, ‘Can I get you some champagne?’ and I said, ‘No, thanks, I don’t drink’—I really didn’t, in those days—and he said, ‘We’ll have to find you a ginger ale, then. Come with me,’ and he took my arm and led me off to the dining room. And just as we arrived, this woman came rushing out of the kitchen passageway. Mother Davitch, that would be. Your . . . great-grandmother; goodness! She was carrying a ham on a platter and I guess we took her by surprise, because when she saw us she said, ‘Oh!’ and stopped short, and the ham continued on without her. Slid clear off the platter and landed at my feet. You never saw such a mess!”

This appeared to interest the children far more than their grandparents’ meeting had. Both stopped what they were doing to focus on Rebecca.

“The poor woman burst into tears,” she said, exaggerating slightly in order to keep their attention. (Actually, what Mother Davitch had done was more in her usual style of just, oh,
dribbling
into tears; trembling and dissolving.) “Well,
I
didn’t know what to do. I was just a big, dumb college girl! And I was worried to death about my shoes: powder-blue pumps dyed to match my dress. There was this icky pink glaze all over them. I said, ‘Do you think I might have a damp cloth, please?’ Mother Davitch misunderstood; she perked right up and, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘never mind; Joe can see to that. But I
will
let you help with the other dishes.’ And that wasn’t the only misunderstanding, because while she was taking me to the kitchen she started going on and on about how she wished she’d known beforehand I was coming; how supper that night was just pickups on account of the party but I was more than welcome anyway; it worried her to death that Joe never brought any girlfriends home. I said, ‘Oh, um, I’m not . . .’ but it didn’t make the least bit of difference; she’d already got this notion in her head. Imagine what I felt! And then we came to the kitchen and there was Biddy, standing on a step stool trying to toss a salad. About five, she must have been. Yes, five: too young to do a very good job. There was more salad on the floor than in the bowl. Mother Davitch said, ‘You’ve met Joe’s oldest, haven’t you?’ I said, ‘Oldest? His oldest . . . child?’ Because underneath, I guess, I was already feeling attracted to him. Oh, I thought, he’s married. Except that Mother Davitch cleared that up in no time. Told me how Joe’s wife had absconded to seek her fortune and left all three of her children on Mother Davitch’s hands.
Dumped
them on her, was how she put it. Right in front of Biddy. ‘Dumped the whole crew on me and escaped to New York City.’ But you know Biddy. Biddy spoke up cool as cream; ‘Mommy’s going to be a famous nightclub singer,’ she said. And Mother Davitch said, ‘Well, so some would have us believe,’ and gave me this pointed look, but Biddy said, ‘She’s got this beautiful dress where the straps are made of diamonds.’ ‘Rhinestones,’ Mother Davitch said, but Biddy told her, ‘Diamonds.’”

Lateesha stopping prinking a diploma bow to ask Rebecca, “Real diamonds?”

“Well, according to Biddy they were.”

Lateesha (who was not so much younger than Biddy had been, come to think of it) gave a sigh of satisfaction.

“Meanwhile,” Rebecca said, “your grandpa was going back and forth with hot water and cloths, cleaning up the dining room. And finally he squatted down on the floor and started wiping my shoes off, right while I was standing there helping Biddy toss the salad.”

The most memorable of the five senses, she often felt, was the sense of touch. After all these years she could still feel the heat of that damp cloth soaking through to her toes, and Joe’s strong, sure dabbing motion that had reminded her of a mother cat industriously bathing her kittens. And she remembered how, once he’d finished, he rose and clasped her arm to lead her away, his warm fingers firmly pressing the bare skin above her elbow. “Where are you taking her?” Mother Davitch had cried in alarm. (For the kitchen was a disaster and that ham had so far been the only dish that had made it to the dining room.) But Joe called over his shoulder, “Don’t worry; we’ll be seeing her again.” Even while Rebecca was wondering at this, she had felt a surge of pleasure.

“We
will
be seeing you, won’t we?” he asked as they entered the rear parlor. “Are you in the Baltimore phone book?”

“Oh, I don’t live in Baltimore; I live in Macadam,” she told him. “I go to Macadam College.”

While she spoke she had looked elsewhere, trying to give the impression that she was offering this information with no particular purpose in mind. She watched the other guests from what felt like a great distance, noticing how flighty Amy seemed and how immature and tittering the girlfriends. (Joe Davitch, Rebecca surmised, was at least in his early thirties.) The fiancé—a loud-voiced, fraternity type—was expounding on possible stag-party sites. Paul Anka was singing “Diana” on the stereo, and the DJ sent Rebecca a grin and cocked his head significantly, although she didn’t know why.

“I get out toward Macadam fairly often,” Joe told her. “Maybe I could look you up.”

She let her eyes drift over to meet his.

He said, “Well, enjoy the party. Goodbye, Rebecca.”

Then he turned and went back to the kitchen.