Back When We Were Grownups (5 page)

Rebecca just stood there for a minute, alone as when she’d first come but with a huge difference. She felt that her crown of gold braids, her blue dress, even her splotched shoes were compellingly attractive. She observed the other guests from a position of . . . power, she would almost say.

“In a way, it was love at first sight,” she told the children.

Joey just said, “Huh,” but Lateesha got all wide-eyed and intense. “I’m going to have love at first sight, too,” she told Rebecca.

Rebecca said, “Well, I hope you do, dear heart.”

*  *  *

Min Foo was so late getting back from the doctor’s that Rebecca gave the children lunch—strawberry-jam-and-cream-cheese sandwiches. Poppy came downstairs and ate with them, although he spent most of the meal warning the children what to expect when they got old. “Step out of bed in the morning and your ankles refuse to bend,” he said. “Know what that feels like? Try it sometime. Try walking not bending your ankles. I clomp to the bathroom like Frankenstein’s monster. And then can’t pee. A simple thing like peeing that you would take for granted. Drip, drip, drip, it finally comes—”

“Ooh, gross!” Lateesha said, screwing up her face.

Poppy ignored her. “Then getting dressed,” he said. “Socks! Shoes! I have to have a special technique just for putting on my shoes. And Beck here has to tie them. It’s just like being a two-year-old. ‘Mom, will you tie my shoes, please?’”

The front door slammed against the closet, and Min Foo said, “Hello?”

“We’re in the kitchen,” Rebecca called.

Min Foo came down the passageway, rustling and jingling. “Hi, everybody,” she said. “Oh, you’re eating.” She gave off the clinical smell of vinyl-upholstered waiting rooms and isopropyl alcohol.

“How was your checkup?” Rebecca asked.

“Dr. Fielding says I’m too fat.”

“I’m sure he didn’t put it
that
way,” Rebecca said. “Won’t you have a sandwich?”

“Mom! I say I’m too fat and you offer me something to eat. Finish up, kids; we’re late for your play date.”

“Can I pour you some milk? Skim, I mean,” Rebecca said.

“No, thanks. We’d better hit the road.”

“Try driving a car when your ankles don’t bend,” Poppy piped up.

“What, Poppy?” Min Foo turned to Rebecca. “I was thinking about your dream,” she said.

“My dream,” Rebecca echoed. In the flurry of lunch, she had started to forget her dream. Now it came back to her, but with the boy more distant now, more of an
other.
“What about it?” she asked Min Foo.

“If you dreamed you had a son, not daughters, and if the son was blond, not dark . . .” Min Foo was shepherding the children toward the front of the house, so that Rebecca had to follow her. “Well, it seems to me,” she said, “that you were dreaming how things would be if you’d chosen a different fork in the road. You know what I mean? If you’d decided on some different kind of life than you have now.”

This struck Rebecca as so apt, and so immediately obvious where it hadn’t been before, that she stopped short. Oh, her girls could surprise her so, every now and then!

“Anyway,” Min Foo was saying, “thanks for keeping the children. Kids, tell Gram goodbye.”

Rebecca said, “Wait!” But then the telephone rang, and she had to turn back to the kitchen.

Poppy, who never answered the phone even when he was sitting right next to it, looked up at her from a spoonful of strawberry jam. Rebecca glared at him and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” she said.

“Mrs. Davitch?”

“Yes.”

“This is Katie Border’s mother. The graduation party?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, here’s the problem: our daughter didn’t graduate.”

“Didn’t graduate!”

“Can you believe it? The little minx: she never said a word. And whatever notification the school might have sent us, I guess she intercepted. So this morning I was hanging out her dress—the ceremony was set for three, her dad had arranged to come home early, both sets of grandparents had flown in over the weekend—when ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘did I mention? I flunked chemistry.’ Well, at first I didn’t catch on. I mean, I failed to understand that flunking chemistry would keep her from graduating. ‘Great, Katie,’ I told her. ‘What if you need to know chemistry later in life? If you’re, I don’t know, shopping for rose food or something?’ And she says, bold as you please . . .”

Rebecca started silently calculating her losses. The planning, the decorations, the deposits made to the disk jockey and the bartender. Alice Farmer, the cleanup maid, would demand to be paid in full regardless, although the waiter (Biddy’s son Dixon) might be more forgiving. The Borders would have to forfeit their own deposit, of course, but that didn’t cover everything. And Biddy would throw a fit. Most of her dishes were perishable and not the kind you could freeze. To say nothing of all her work, and the thought she’d given the menu.

“Well, isn’t it fortunate,” Rebecca told Mrs. Border, “that you’d already set up this party. It sends a message, don’t you think?”

“’Mom,’ she said to me . . . Message?”

“When your daughter must be feeling so disheartened, so discouraged with herself. But here’s this wonderful party to show her how much you love her.”

“Oh, Mrs. Davitch, I can’t imagine—”

“And a message to your friends, as well. A sort of statement.”

“My friends! I don’t know how I’ll face them. They’re all going to feel so sorry for me. Behind my back they’ll be telling each other—”

“Mrs. Border, have you ever stopped to consider what a marvelous purpose a party serves? Think about it! At a moment when you and your daughter would normally not be speaking, when you know she must feel ashamed in front of the world at large and the world is surely wondering what to say to
you,
why, everyone’s thrown together in a gigantic celebration. Everyone’s forced to hug, and kiss, and toast the other graduates, and announce to everyone else that what matters is you all love each other. It’s like that scientific discovery they made a few years back; remember? They discovered that if you fake a smile, your smile muscles somehow trigger some reaction in the brain and you’ll start feeling the way you pretended to feel, happy and relaxed. Remember?”

“Well . . .”

“Imagine if you hadn’t had the foresight to schedule this party! Because we’ve been booked for months and months ahead, this time of year. You’d call and say, ‘Do you have an evening this week when we could throw a little fete for our daughter? She’s experiencing such, um . . . low self-esteem’—yes, that’s the term: ‘self-esteem’—‘and we want to show her we love her.’ I would have to say, ‘Sorry, Mrs. Border—‘”

“And it’s true it’s going to be hard to cancel our guests,” Mrs. Border said. “If I had any hope of reaching just their answering machines I’d start telephoning this instant, but you know how people tend to pick up the receiver precisely when you don’t want to talk. I’d be forced to make all these complicated excuses.”

“Oh! It would be so difficult!” Rebecca told her.

“I did consider tacking a note to your front door, saying the party had been postponed due to unforeseen circumstances. Cowardly, I admit, but—”

“And also wasteful!” Rebecca said. “Wasting that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a memory that will last long, long after your daughter’s made up her chemistry credits and graduated and gone on to college and you’ve forgotten all about her momentary little setback.”

She stopped for air, and Mrs. Border said, “I guess we do have to remember what’s important here.”

“Absolutely,” Rebecca said. She squared her shoulders. “Oh, one thing I’d meant to call you about: when shall I expect Binstock to bring the flowers?”

“Well, they promised them for three o’clock, but now I don’t know if—”

“Three is fine,” Rebecca said smoothly. “I’ll make sure to be here. See you this evening, Mrs. Border.”

“Well . . . so . . . well, yes, I suppose,” Mrs. Border said.

Rebecca hung up and sank into a chair.

“Way to go, Beck,” Poppy said, setting aside the jam jar.

“I’m exhausted,” she told him.

And also . . . what was it she felt? Compromised. She was a fraud.

Yet when Poppy asked, “Isn’t it time for my nap?” she found herself once again putting on her hostess act. “You are absolutely right!” she told him, all zip and vigor. “Look at that clock! Let me help you to your room.” And she rose to slide his chair back.

He was light as milkweed, these days. He tilted against her and breathed rapidly and shallowly, clutching his cane in his free hand but relying on her for support. “There’s also the question of aches,” he announced when they reached the stairs. His breath smelled like strawberries. “Take inventory at any given moment and you have to say your back aches, your shoulders ache, your knees are stiff, your neck has a crick—”

“The moral of the story is, stop taking inventory,” Rebecca told him. “Don’t think about it. Put your mind on something else.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re still in your forties.”

“My forties! I’m fifty-three,” she said.

“You are?”

She helped him up another step.

“How did that happen so
fast
?” he asked.

Rebecca laughed.

After she had deposited him in his room, she crossed the hall to the family room. Superman had grown tired of pausing and the screen had reverted to a television commercial—a woman asking why her hardwood floors were so dull. Rebecca switched it off and sat down at the little spinet desk to write checks. The window washers, the gas and electric, the man who had patched the front stoop . . .

Gradually, her pen grew slower. She took longer and longer to reach for each new bill, until finally she came to a halt and just sat staring into space.

*  *  *

“I see you’re having a wonderful time,” Joe Davitch had said.

His very first remark to her.

Wasn’t it strange how certain moments, now and then—certain turning points in a life—contained the curled and waiting seeds of everything that would follow?
I see you’re having a wonderful time:
Joe’s view of her forever after, his unwavering belief that she was a natural-born celebrator. And look at her answer: “Yes!” she’d said. “Thanks!” Or something of the sort. In a loud and energetic tone so as to be heard above the stereo. And from that day forth she seemed to have confirmed his view, although really she had been the very opposite sort of person, muted and retiring, deeply absorbed in her studies, the only child of a widow in little Church Valley, Virginia, and engaged-to-be-engaged to her high-school sweetheart.

She had swerved onto a whole different fork in the road. (As Min Foo would put it.)

For one brief, wistful moment, Rebecca entertained the notion of turning back, retracing her steps to where the fork had first branched. Church Valley still existed, after all. Her mother was still alive. Although the high-school sweetheart, no doubt, had found somebody else to marry by now. She pictured herself returning in the dress that she had worn to that party—powder blue, scoop-necked, short-sleeved—and the powder-blue pumps still faintly splotched with ham glaze. Carrying the witty (as she’d thought then) patent leather pocketbook shaped to resemble a workman’s lunch box, although it, too, was powder blue.

In those days, everything had matched. There had not been any surprises.

*  *  *

“Hello-o-o!” Biddy called, and the clatter of catering trays followed the slam of the door. Then Binstock arrived with the flowers, and a woman phoned to arrange an office cocktail party, and the plasterer showed up to mend the hole in the dining-room ceiling.

Life went on, in other words.

Rebecca spread a bright cloth across the dining-room table and set one of Binstock’s arrangements in the center. “Pretty,” the plasterer said, peering down from his ladder. He had promised, cross his heart, not to create any mess, but already Rebecca could see several white flecks on the carpet. “Rick—” she said, and he said, “I know! I know! It’ll all be vacuumed up again; trust me.”

Sad when your plasterer’s such a fixture that he knows what you’re going to say before you say it.

Biddy was trying to fit her trays into the refrigerator. “What
is
all this?” she asked Rebecca. “It looks like you’re planning to feed the Red Army.”

“Those are leftovers from the picnic.”

For cooking, Biddy always wore surgical scrubs—a full tunic and baggy green pants that hid her skinny figure. She had her ponytail balled hygienically into a hairnet. She said, “Could you fetch me the cake stand? The glass one, with the pedestal.”

“Oh, I hope you haven’t put any writing on the cake.”

“Just
Congratulations, Katie
.”

“Well, Katie flunked her chemistry course.”

Biddy shut the fridge door and gave Rebecca a look.

“Could we peel off the
Congratulations
?” Rebecca asked. “Just leave
Katie
?”

“Not without any traces, we couldn’t.”

“At least they didn’t cancel,” Rebecca said, lifting down the cake stand from an overhead shelf. “I had to talk mighty fast, as you can imagine. Where’s the cake?”

“In that tin by the stove.”

The tin was a rusty white metal box that had belonged to Mother Davitch. Rebecca took the lid off and peered inside. “Maybe we could cover it with another layer of chocolate,” she said.

“I don’t have any chocolate. Do you?”

“I have peanut butter.”

But all she got for that was another look.

Sometimes Rebecca wondered what Biddy really thought of her. What any of her stepdaughters thought of her, in fact. Of course there’d been a few of those you’re-not-my-mother scenes at the start. (“You cow!” Patch had shouted once. “You big old frumpy fat cow; just wait till my mama gets back!”) By now, though, all three seemed cordial and even affectionate, in an offhand sort of way. When Biddy went through that terrible time at age twenty—losing her fiancé to an asthma attack and discovering she was pregnant just two days later—she had come straightaway to Rebecca; not to her mother. She had told Rebecca the whole situation and asked for her advice. But then she had ignored it. Not only had she made up her mind to keep the baby; but the following week she’d returned to debate moving in with her fiancé’s homosexual brother and then she had ignored that advice as well. “Do
what?
” Rebecca had said. “Um, Biddy, it’s awfully nice of Troy to make the offer, but please, think about this. It’s not fair to either one of you. You’ll want to meet a new man someday, whether or not you can picture that now, and it won’t be all that easy if you’re installed in another man’s house. And you know that Troy will eventually find someone of his own. This is a mistake, believe me!”