Back When We Were Grownups (7 page)

Girls’ eyes were always on Dixon. He was eighteen years old and six feet tall, black-haired and brown-eyed and coolly, casually elegant even in his white waiter’s coat. But he seemed indifferent to his conquests—had, in fact, a long-term sweetheart, disappointingly plain-faced—and never responded to the girls who fluttered around him at parties. Now he was lowering a tray of stuffed mushrooms onto Merrie’s outstretched palms. While Katie, as if pulled by strings, started drifting toward him, he tracked Merrie’s progress through the crowd. Merrie seemed awfully unsteady on her feet, Rebecca noticed. Why, she was wearing high-heeled shoes. What on earth . . . ? Also a great long string of colored wooden beads, Rebecca’s beads, actually, which were dangling in the mushrooms. Rebecca stifled a laugh and turned to catch the last of something Mr. Border was saying. “The what?” she asked. “Oh, the cornices, yes . . .”

Merrie tottered past an elderly couple sitting on a love seat, past a woman in a brocade dress with an armored-looking bosom, past two business-suited men, and she didn’t offer food to any of them, although one of the men seemed about to make a grab. She reached her goal—four teenaged girls, all in white—and gazed up raptly, adoringly, with the tray held out in front of her. Then Dixon approached, and the girls turned in unison and melted in his direction. Merrie asked, “Stuffed mushrooms?”

“Now, Harold here makes a wonderful martini,” Rebecca told Mr. Border. “Or if you’d prefer something nonalcoholic . . . Oh, you’re right, this is definitely an occasion for strong drink! Let’s ask him to fix you one, shall we?”

A light touch on Mr. Border’s elbow, a quick, bright smile toward Harold. A tilt of the head for Dixon:
Could you pry Merrie away from those girls and start her circulating, please?

At a perfect party, Rebecca would be unnecessary. The drinks would flow, the trays would magically stay full, the guests would mingle freely, nobody would be standing forlornly in a corner. Then Rebecca could retreat to the kitchen, or maybe steal upstairs a while to rest her feet. But there were no perfect parties. That was something a social misfit like Rebecca knew instinctively; while the Davitches, bless their hearts, hadn’t had an inkling. Not even Joe. (Looming up beside her to announce, so mistakenly, “I see you’re having a wonderful time.”)

In the Davitches’ view, the Open Arms existed simply to provide a physical space, sometimes with food and drink as well if the customer was misguided enough not to hire an outside caterer. What they hadn’t understood was that almost more important was an invisible oiling of the gears, so to speak: pointing one person toward the liquor and another person away from it, finding a chair for an elderly aunt or loading her plate or fetching her sweater, calming an overexcited child, signaling to the DJ to lower the volume, hushing the crowd for the toasts, stepping in to fill an awkward silence. Yes, a large part of Rebecca’s job had to do with noise, really. You shouldn’t have too much noise, but neither should you have too little, and she often felt that her main function was keeping a party’s sound level at a certain larky, lilting babble, even if it meant that she was forced to babble herself.

Won’t you have a petit four? Oh, how can you say such a thing? If anything, you’re
under
weight! Of course, let me show you the way. The light switch is on your right, just inside the . . . Why don’t I freshen that drink for you? All right, everybody, gather round! I’ve been told we have a real musician with us tonight! Diet tonic water? Why, certainly! I’ll run get some from the . . . Whose little girl are
you
? And isn’t that a pretty dress! Welcome! Many happy returns! Congratulations! Best wishes!

I see you’re having a wonderful time.

*  *  *

“I’m thinking of taking a trip,” she told Zeb on the phone.

Often, after she was in bed, the two of them would go over their respective days together—their minor triumphs and their petty irritations. She knew that was pathetic. Most people had husbands or wives whom they could bore with such things. All Rebecca had was her kid brother-in-law—although “kid” was probably not the right term for a middle-aged bachelor doctor.

Tonight’s party had been such a success that she hadn’t had the heart to break it up at the designated hour. Now she worried she was calling Zeb too late, but he said no, he was reading. He said, “A trip would do you good. A real rest. Maybe a cruise.”

“I don’t mean that kind of trip,” she said. “I thought I might go see my mother. Just an overnight stay. Would you be willing to come to the house and spend the night with Poppy sometime?”

“Well, sure, whenever you like. Is your mother okay?”

“She’s fine,” Rebecca said. “But I was thinking I’d like to go home and sort of . . . reconnoiter. Check out my roots.” She gave a light laugh.

“Zeb,” she said, “do you ever get the feeling you’ve changed into a whole different person?”

Probably he didn’t (he was living in the city where he’d been born, doing what he had planned to do since childhood), but he seemed to give her question serious thought. “Hmm,” he said. “Well . . .”

“I mean, look at me!” she told him. “I’m a professional party-giver! I never read anymore, or discuss important issues, or go to cultural events. I don’t even have any friends.”

“You’ve got friends,” Zeb said. “You’ve got me; you’ve got the girls—”

“Those are relatives. And everyone else I know is some kind of repairman.”

“You can have friends who are relatives. You can have repairman friends.”

“But what happened to the people I knew in college? Or in high school? Amy Darrow—the girl who had her engagement party the night I met Joe, remember? Whatever happened to Amy? I didn’t even go to her wedding! By then I was married myself and all three girls had chicken pox.”

“I’m sure you could track her down if you tried.”

“I should get myself a dog,” Rebecca said.

Zeb snorted.

She said, “If I had a dog to walk, it would be easier to meet people.”

“You don’t want a dog,” Zeb told her.

“Well, it’s true they’re a lot of trouble,” she said. She traced the stitching across her top sheet. “They need to be fed and watered and taken to the vet and such.”

“They’re as demanding as toddlers,” Zeb said.

“Besides, I don’t even like dogs.”

“Then you certainly don’t want one.”

“They bark at night, and chew things.”

“Rebecca.
Forget
the dog.”

“But how will I make friends, then?” she asked him. She knew she was being ridiculous, but she couldn’t seem to drop the subject once she’d gotten hold of it. “I’m not good at starting conversations with some stranger on the street.”

“You could just walk around with a leash and an empty collar.”

“What? How would that help?”

“You’d see someone and she’d ask, ‘Excuse me, where’s your dog?’ And you’d say, ‘Oh, no! My dog! I must have lost him! Could you please help me look for him?’”

“Then the two of us could go on walking, getting to know each other—”

“You’d have to be careful, though, not to let that person catch you doing the same thing to someone else the next day. She’d spot you up ahead of her, you’d be dragging your empty collar, you’d be saying to someone new, ‘Oh, no! My dog! I must have lost him!’”

By now Rebecca had the giggles, and Zeb was laughing too.

Eventually, though, she said, “Well.” She sighed. “I should let you sleep. I’ll check with you again as soon as I figure out when I can leave.”

“Any time,” Zeb told her.

Then they said good night, and she hung up and lay back on her pillow.

The best way to travel to Church Valley was by car. Although it was possible, too, to take a bus. She could do that if she didn’t mind a transfer. What was not possible was a train, but somehow, even so, she pictured going by train. She pictured sitting in an aisle seat, next to the son who would have been hers if only she had continued with the life she had begun.

Three

A
s soon as I sort my belongings I’m moving to a retirement home,” Rebecca’s mother said. “I already know which one. It’s just that I need to get my belongings sorted first.”

They were sitting in Rebecca’s mother’s living room—Rebecca in an armchair, her mother on the couch. Her mother wore her usual outfit of pastel polyester top and dark, skinny knit slacks with the creases stitched down the front. She was eighty-seven years old—a little cornhusk doll, straw-colored and drily rustling. Rebecca had outweighed her since late childhood, but she had always considered her to be a sturdy woman. It came as a shock to picture her in a retirement home. “What’s made you think of moving?” she asked. “Are you having any health problems?”

“No, not a one. But Church Valley isn’t like when you lived here, Rebecca. After they built that mall out where the duck farm used to be, why, seems we just got hollow at the center. Downtown isn’t even downtown anymore. So I signed up for a unit at Havenhurst, but I don’t know when I’ll get to go there with all these belongings to sort.”

Rebecca glanced around her. She didn’t see any evidence that her mother had started yet. Not that there was much to do—this was a small house, fastidiously tidy—but every object had the glued-down appearance of something that had stayed in the same position for decades. Two hurricane lamps were spaced symmetrically on the mantel, an Oriental vase was centered in the front window, and the table at Rebecca’s elbow bore a shrinelike arrangement of three gilt-framed photos, a candy dish, and a bowl of faded silk flowers. If she were to pick up, say, her parents’ wedding photo and set it down again, she knew her mother would be over in two seconds to readjust its location by a fraction of an inch.

“Maybe I could help,” she said.

“Oh, no, thank you,” her mother said. “I won’t forget what happened when your Aunt Ida tried to help. It took me days to undo what she’d done! And some things I could never undo. For instance, she threw away an entire sheet of postage stamps; three-cent postage stamps. I wasn’t aware of it at the time because I was out of the room, fixing her a snack. That’s how it is when people try to help: they need snacks and cups of tea, and before you know it you’ve gone to more trouble than if they’d stayed at home. I brought out a plate of those peppermint patties that she’s always been so fond of, and then she told me she was on a diet. I said, ‘What do you mean, a diet? I’ve been nagging you all your life to diet and it didn’t do the least bit of good; so why would you take it into your head now that you’re in your eighties?’ And Ida said—“

“But the stamps . . .” Rebecca prodded her. Then she wondered why she’d bothered, since even the stamps were not the point of the conversation.

“The thing is, I didn’t know she’d thrown them out. There I was in the kitchen, waiting on her hand and foot, and meanwhile Ida was in the living room merrily discarding my stamps. When I went to look for them later in the week, I couldn’t find them. I phoned her. I said, ‘Ida, what did you do with those stamps?’ ‘What stamps?’ she asked, innocent as an angel. ‘That sheet of stamps in my desk drawer,’ I said. ‘There’s not a thing in that drawer now but dried-up ballpoint pens with advertising on them.’ And Ida said, ‘I hope I didn’t throw them away.’ ‘Throw them away!’ I told her.”

Rebecca said, “Well, luckily they were—”

“I said, ‘
Where
did you throw them away?’ and she said, ‘Now I’m not saying for certain that I did, you understand.’ ‘Where?’ I said, and she said, ‘The recycling sack under the sink, maybe?’ I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘You didn’t.’ I said, ‘You couldn’t have.’ Because I’d gotten rid of that sack on paper collection day.”

“Luckily,” Rebecca said, “they were only three-cent stamps.”

“A
hundred
three-cent stamps, might I add. What we’re saying is, my sister threw away three dollars. And I told her as much. ‘Fine, I’ll pay you back,’ she said. ‘Next time I come over to visit, I’ll bring three dollar bills.’ Which is so exactly like her, isn’t it? I said, ‘Now, what on earth will that accomplish? You’d still have wasted three dollars, and all for nothing. We might as well have burned it; that money’s simply gone. Turned to paper soup in the recycling plant.’”

Rebecca started jiggling one foot.

“So I’ll just do my sorting on my own,” her mother told her. “Never let it be said that I’m unable to learn from experience.”

And she tucked her chin in modestly and gazed down at her lap, while Rebecca recrossed her legs and started jiggling the other foot.

*  *  *

It had taken her more than a month to find the time for this trip, and now they were in the full bloom of summer—a Thursday in mid-July. When they set out on a walk to Ida’s after lunch, the town appeared to be liquefied by the heat, all wavery and smeared like something behind antique window glass. The clay path leading down to the river was baked as hard as linoleum, and the footbridge’s black metal railing burned Rebecca’s hand. The river itself—wide but shallow, pebble-bottomed—seemed sluggish and exhausted, its sound less a rush than a series of slow glugs. Rebecca paused halfway across to study it. “The funniest thing,” she told her mother. “Lately, I’ve started loving rivers.”

“Loving them!”

“I’ve always
liked
them, of course; but I look at a river now and it just satisfies my eyes, you know? It seems to me so . . . old-fashioned.”

“Maybe you should move back here, then.”

“Well . . .”

“Why not? The girls are grown; you’ve got no responsibilities.”

“Only the Open Arms,” Rebecca said.

“The what? Oh, the Open Arms. Well, that’s the Davitches’ business; not yours.”

“No, actually, it’s mine,” Rebecca said. This was a startling thought, for some reason. She said, “It’s how I make my money, what little of it there is. How would I make any money in Church Valley?”

“I’m sure you’d find something or other,” her mother said.

“Besides, I’ve got Poppy to think of.”

“Poppy! Is that old man still alive?”

“Of course he’s still alive. Next December he’ll be a hundred. I’m planning a gigantic hundredth-birthday party for him,” Rebecca said. Then she stopped to reflect upon the oddly boastful note that seemed to have crept into her voice.

“What I’d do,” her mother said, as if Rebecca hadn’t spoken, “is put my house in your name instead of selling it. Let you move right in. Leave you most of the furnishings, even.”

Rebecca said, “Oh, I suspect you’ll need to sell your house in order to afford the retirement home.”

“I’m not getting but a little studio unit. The least expensive model. I can pay for it out of my pension.”

She had worked for nearly thirty years in the basement of the county courthouse, keeping track of old documents. Rebecca didn’t suppose that her pension was very large. She said gently, “Thanks anyhow, Mother.”

But as they climbed the steep path on the other side of the river, approaching her aunt’s part of town, she briefly entertained a fantasy of returning here to live. She imagined her routine: each day crossing the river for her meager supply of groceries, stopping first at the library the way she used to as a child. She had been the kind of child a librarian would love, she saw now, so pale and polite and considerate, careful to check that her hands were spotless before reverently selecting yet another Louisa May Alcott book. This was in the late fifties, when other children were turning to TV, but Rebecca—pudgy even then and stodgily dressed, her father dead and her mother several years older than any of her classmates’ mothers—was not in step with most other children. She had always been the town’s Bright Girl. (“Brain” was the term they used.) She tended to stay on the fringe of things, observing from a distance, and she had noticed that what she observed was often outside the normal frame of vision. It was as if she didn’t
have
a frame of vision, so that during the Christmas pageant her attention might be caught by some small personal drama in the audience while everybody else was watching the stage. But she was not unhappy. She had had several friends, and in high school she’d had a boyfriend. And she was good at amusing herself when she was alone. In fact she’d been very content with things just the way they were; her set-apart position had felt comfortable, and restful.

When she grew up and left for college, the librarian gave her a going-away gift: a leather-bound blank book entitled
A Reader’s Life List
. But Rebecca used only the first few pages, because college was when everything changed.

College was when she met Joe.

She said, “I don’t suppose Miss Bolt still works at the library, does she?”

“Good heavens,” her mother said, “I haven’t thought of Miss Bolt in ages. I’m sure she must have passed on. Anyway, now they use volunteers, and the library isn’t open but three half-days a week.”

It was ludicrous to imagine moving back here. Rebecca didn’t know a soul.

But when she pointed that out—“See there? To me Church Valley’s all strangers”—her mother said, “Oh, piffle. You know Aunt Ida. You know the Finches. And Abbie Field and Sherry and the Nolan twins.”

“Do you still see all of them?”

“Well, of course! This town is very close-knit.”

She must mean the older people in town, though, for it was clear that she didn’t recognize the various teenagers and young mothers they met walking along Grove Street. She threaded her way between them without so much as a glance; and for all the attention they paid her, she might have been invisible.

Aunt Ida lived above Gates Drugstore. Arnold Gates, the pharmacist, had been her husband, and after his death she’d sold the drugstore but arranged to continue living in the four little rooms upstairs. Nobody would have guessed she was Rebecca’s mother’s sister. She tended to put on weight, and she dyed her hair a metallic red, and she wore frilly, too-young dresses and bright makeup. Today she was all in pink—pink strappy sandals and pink toenails, even—with some kind of gauzy pink ruching knotted around her throat. And her apartment was as cluttered as her clothing. “Now, let me clear you a path,” she said as they entered. “Oh, my, what is this doing here?”—referring to a Raggedy Ann doll grinning from the carpet. A reasonable question, since Ida had no children or grandchildren. (The great tragedy of her life, she always said.) But then, she was forever opening her doors to other people’s offspring.

When Rebecca was a very small girl, she had nourished a secret daydream that her parents would painlessly die and she could go live with her aunt. Ida was so welcoming and easygoing; her household seemed capable of limitless expansion, and almost any time Rebecca dropped in she found somebody staying a week or two—a toddler whose mother was sick, or Arnold Gates’s ne’er-do-well nephew, or, on one memorable occasion, three members of a Polish wrestling team visiting Church Valley High on some kind of sports exchange program. When Rebecca’s father actually did die (felled by a stroke just after her ninth birthday), she had felt so guilty that she’d avoided her aunt for months. And besides, her mother needed her at home.

“Well, come on in where I can look at you,” Ida was saying. “Oh, my! I would never have the courage to wear plaid with paisley, but on you it’s so artistic.”

Rebecca’s mother, moving an armload of magazines so she could settle in a rocker, said, “You didn’t tell me they were painting the hardware store, Ida. We passed it and it just about hit me in the face. Oxblood, I would call it; or, no, more like magenta. I said to Rebecca, I said, ‘What a pushy color!’ And then of course the Woolworth’s; Rebecca’s not been here since they closed the Woolworth’s, and I can’t even remember the store that used to be next to it, can you? I was trying to think. Not the jeweler’s; that was across the street. Not the pet supply. Well, I know it will come to me eventually. Wait! No, not the shoe repair . . .”

“Sit right here; move the cat,” Ida told Rebecca. “Look at what I’ve made you! Froot Loop Bark Candy, it’s called. I got the recipe out of the paper. Isn’t it pretty? The bright spots come from the Froot Loops and the lighter spots are colored-marshmallow bits. I tried them out first on the neighbors’ little boy; he was staying here a while because, oh, it’s such a sad story . . .”

“A fingernail place!” Rebecca’s mother said. “That’s what it was! Can you imagine a place devoted to nothing but fingernails? No wonder it closed!”

Rebecca took a bite from her piece of candy, which looked more like some kind of novelty toilet soap. As soon as she could get her teeth unstuck, she asked her aunt, “Is that Percival?”

She meant the cat—a fat gray tabby. “Why, no, dear,” Ida said, “that’s Daisy. Percival died last Christmastime.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Yes, I had to have him put to sleep on account of kidney trouble. I wanted Dr. More to do it before he retired; you know he’d tended Percival ever since kittenhood.”

“I myself,” Rebecca’s mother said, “have never had a professional manicure in my life and I don’t believe my nails are any the worse for it. Who knows what you could pick up in such a place? Sharing instruments with strangers—files and clippers and scissors and such.”

“Dr. More retired at the end of the year when he turned sixty-five,” Ida told Rebecca. “He said he was moving to Florida.”

“Well, he should know,” Rebecca’s mother said smartly.

There was a sudden silence, as if the sisters had surprised themselves with this momentary convergence in their conversation. Then Ida sat forward, clasping her plump, ringed hands, and said, “How long will you be with us, Rebecca?”

“Just until tomorrow. I’ve left Poppy with Zeb overnight, but I should be back in time to give him lunch.”

“And tell us about NoNo! I’m so thrilled that she’s engaged.”

This was what Rebecca loved about her aunt. Her mother had not inquired after NoNo, or Patch or Biddy either; they weren’t blood relations. Her only question had concerned her “real” granddaughter, Min Foo—how her pregnancy was proceeding—and she had worn a pinched and remote expression as she asked, because she had disapproved of Min Foo ever since her second marriage, the one to LaVon. But Ida seemed equally attached to all four girls, and still sent each of them a dollar bill in a Hallmark card for their birthdays. “Your mother says NoNo isn’t planning much of a wedding,” she said now, “but I hope she’ll change her mind. Is she thinking she’s too old? She’s not too old! Nowadays lots of people don’t get married till their forties. And she’s waited so long for Mr. Right; all the more reason to celebrate.”