by Anne Tyler
For their lunch she packed sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade and they went for a hike up Bert Kane Ridge. They ate on the wrinkled mound of granite at the top—Elephant Rock, it was called—which was covered with names and hearts and initials dating all the way back to the 1920s. From time to time other hikers passed, so it wasn’t as private as she had hoped, but she and Derek sat close together and exchanged a few discreet kisses. Willa pointed out the distant road where her parents lived, and the steeple of their church just below them. “Looks like a nice place for a wedding,” Derek said, even though he could not have known that from where he sat.
Willa was worried he might start talking again about marrying this summer, so she said, “Oh, look, jack-in-the-pulpits! I haven’t seen jack-in-the-pulpits for ages,” and the subject of the church was dropped.
For supper that night her parents took them to the area’s best restaurant, the Nu-Deal Inn out on the East-West Parkway. Willa had been hoping that Elaine would come along to dilute the conversation (was how she thought of it), but Elaine wasn’t even around to turn them down, so they went without her. The Nu-Deal was family-style, with long, linen-draped tables where the diners all sat together and helped themselves from giant platters of fried chicken and barbecued ribs and sliced ham and turnip greens cooked with fatback. Willa’s mother got involved in a conversation with a woman who was a huge fan, she said; she’d seen Willa’s mother play Amanda in a production of The Glass Menagerie at the Garrettville Little Theatre. Willa’s mother said, “Oh, aren’t you nice to remember! Goodness, that was so long ago.” So then of course Willa’s father had to explain to Derek about his wife’s acting hobby. “I think she really could have made something of herself if we’d lived in a big city,” he said. “She’s got this flair; I mean, when she is on the stage the audience looks only at her. Take that Glass Menagerie, for instance: why, she was not the star, this young crippled girl was, but Alice swoops in and she’s so full of verve and just…uninhibited, you know, and enthusiastic—”
“Oh, Melvin, stop,” Willa’s mother said with a laugh, and she gave him an affectionate swat on the arm.
He beamed at her, his eyes twinkling behind his tiny, very clean lenses. “Well, anyhow,” he told Derek, “maybe someday you’ll get to see her in something and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.”
Did that mean he hoped Derek would be more than a one-time guest? Did it mean he approved of him?
Neither of Willa’s parents had voiced an opinion about Derek so far. Several times during the day Willa had made a point of being conveniently at hand when Derek was out of hearing, but still they had said nothing. This was unlike them—or at least unlike her mother, who could have a very sharp eye when it came to Willa’s friends. Her father was generally more noncommittal. Now, though, he told Derek, “Summers they always do a Shakespeare play, and she’s bound to get a part in that. You should come back in the summer.” Willa took that as an excellent sign. She looked over at Derek (please don’t let him go into how he hoped they’d be married by summer), and he said, “Sure thing, I’d enjoy that.” Willa relaxed.
The other unanswered question was how Derek felt about them. She’d had any number of opportunities to ask him, but she hadn’t. Maybe she thought he would be more truthful if she didn’t try to force it out of him.
Quietly buttering her biscuit, she felt important, suddenly. She was the sole reason these three people were sitting here. For once she was the absolute center of her world, and she took her own sweet time over the biscuit, keeping her eyes lowered and spreading the butter exactly to the biscuit’s edges with slow, even strokes that felt languorous and self-indulgent.
* * *
—
The next day was Easter Sunday and they all went to church except Elaine, who said she wasn’t a Christian. “What has that got to do with it?” her mother asked, but she didn’t insist. When they got home, though (after a painful social interval where Willa and Derek had to chitchat with various inquisitive church ladies), Willa’s mother went directly to the living room, where Elaine was lounging behind the Sunday paper, and said, “I just want you to know that you are joining us for lunch, missy; no ifs or ands or buts. Your sister’s leaving this afternoon and you have not had one meal with us the entire time she’s been here.”
“Fine; whatever,” Elaine said, not emerging from behind her paper.
Derek wasn’t around for that conversation—he’d gone upstairs to pack—so when he walked into the dining room later and saw the table set for five he raised his eyebrows. “Whoa,” he said, “Morticia’s honoring us with her presence?”
“Who knows?” Willa said bleakly. She was beginning to feel a little hurt about Elaine. She had imagined that the two of them could have a few private talks together; commiserate about their mother’s craziness as they used to and maybe discuss Derek. But it seemed that Elaine had begun to lump Willa in with their parents in her general resentment.
When lunch was announced, though, she did come to the table and drop into her seat. She was still wearing pajamas, striped flannel, with a huge moth-eaten cardigan sagging over them, but her sheets of hair were combed smooth and the heavy black slashes were freshly painted around her eyes. “Rabbit stew,” she informed Derek, when her mother rose to lift the lid off the cast-iron pot in front of her.
Derek said, “Really?”
“You don’t like rabbit?” Willa’s mother asked him.
“No, I…sure, I like it fine,” he said.
“It’s a recipe from my aunt Rachel,” she said, picking up a serving spoon. “Civet de lievre.” (She gave the r a fancy gargled sound that made Willa want to crawl under the table.) “Aunt Rachel was the gourmet cook in my family. The rest of them…oh, you wouldn’t believe what dreadful meals my mother served.”
Willa and Elaine had been told many, many stories about those meals. “A clump of mashed split peas glopped onto a plate…,” Willa began, and Elaine chimed in, “…topped with an iceberg-lettuce salad drenched in bottled orange-colored dressing…”
“On special occasions, tinned pineapple chunks were added to the salad,” Willa said.
“On non-special occasions, dinner was canned baked beans on a slice of Wonder bread.”
They were enjoying themselves; it was sort of like a comedy routine. Even their mother was smiling, although she said, “Now, girls, don’t poke fun at your poor old grandma.” She passed Derek his plate and reached for Willa’s.
“I always liked her cooking,” their father said wistfully.
“Oh, you just liked that she made a fuss over you,” their mother told him.
“She made a fuss over him?” Willa asked. She hadn’t known that. She’d always figured that her grandparents—longtime Philadelphians—must look down on her father, with his backcountry origins.
But her mother said, “Well, I had been dating this boy they couldn’t stand. He was infatuated with flying and once took me up in his father’s Piper Cub and we had to crash-land on the New Jersey Turnpike.”
She had finished filling everyone’s plate now. She sat down and flashed a smile around the table before she unfolded her napkin. Derek blinked, but the others just started eating. (Her family always reacted to these tales with embarrassment. Not that they disbelieved them, exactly, but her elated tone made them uneasy—her feverish gaiety, her dramatic leaps in narrative. It seemed she might at any moment cross the line, as Willa put it to herself.)
“Speaking of flying,” Willa’s father said after a moment, “I was thinking, Wills, maybe you would want to pop in and speak to Security when we take you to the airport.”
Willa said, “Security?”
“Just to report that guy on the plane’s behavior. I mean, they must have a record of whoever occupied that seat, don’t you think?”
Elaine said, “What guy on the plane?” at the same time th
at Willa said, “Would our airport even have a Security?”
“You don’t want him going around doing that to other passengers,” her father said.
“What guy are you talking about?” Elaine asked Willa. While Willa was figuring out how to word it (how not to sound like their mother telling one of her tales), their father said, “The man sitting next to Willa poked something in her ribs that he said was a gun and told her not to move.”
“He what?”
“He was probably just some disturbed person,” Derek told her.
“What did you do?” Elaine asked Willa.
“Well…nothing,” Willa said.
“You didn’t do anything?”
“Derek said we should trade places along about then and so we did and that was the end of it.”
“You didn’t tell anybody? You didn’t press your call button?”
“Call button?” Willa asked.
Elaine let out a disgusted puff of a breath and set her fork down. “Geez, and then what?” she asked. “You just went back to reading your magazine?”
“Well, I didn’t actually have a—”
“I cannot believe this,” Elaine told them all. “How could she not make a fuss?”
“Oh, it isn’t so hard to understand,” her father said. “First of all, on a crowded plane it was probably best to downplay things. No point causing a ruckus. Also, none of us knows how we’d react ourselves in a situation like that.”
“I know how I would react,” Elaine said.
Willa said, “But that might have made things worse.”
“When I was a student in Philly,” their father told them, “I was taking out the garbage one night and this guy stepped up and pointed a knife at me. Set the tip of it just below my breastbone; I could feel it through my T-shirt. He said, ‘Hand over your wallet,’ and I said, ‘I don’t have a wallet.’ I mean, I was only taking the garbage out, right? He said, ‘Don’t you lie to me.’ ‘Honest,’ I said, ‘all I have in my pockets is a pack of chewing gum,’ and he says, ‘What the—?’ Then, ‘You’re just this wimpy weak white guy,’ he says, and I say, ‘You think I don’t know that?’ and he says, ‘Huh?’ I said, ‘You think I don’t feel like I’m too white, too thin, too Waspy?’ Guy folds his knife and says, ‘Shoot, man’—only he didn’t use the word ‘shoot’—‘you’re just a loser,’ he says, and walks off shaking his head.”
Willa laughed, but Elaine said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” and Derek said, “Wait. You can’t let people get away with talking to you like that!”
Willa’s father surveyed him mildly, but he didn’t bother arguing. Then, just when Willa herself was about to speak (she could identify with her father’s story; she had often had that too-white feeling), her mother said, “I agree, Derek. That story always makes me furious.”
So it was everybody else against Willa and her father, it seemed. But her father didn’t look perturbed. He tipped his chair back on its two rear legs (another thing that made her mother furious) and sent an amused smile around the table, but Willa was the only one who smiled back.
* * *
—
Willa was fitting her last few toiletries into her suitcase when Derek appeared, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder. “So this is your room,” he said, looking around.
“Mm-hmm.”
He set his bag down and came over to study the bulletin board. Once it had been plastered with Willa’s things, but if any vestiges remained of her high-school days they were buried now beneath markers from Elaine’s bewildering life—a bumper sticker reading “Nobody for President,” ticket stubs bearing names of bands Willa hadn’t heard of, somebody’s penciled cartoon of Snow White smoking a joint.
“I guess before we leave we should tell them we’re engaged,” Derek said, seemingly addressing Snow White.
“What? Why?” Willa asked.
He turned and looked at her.
“You mean now?” she asked him.
He said, “Willa, have you changed your mind about this?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “But we’re going to be engaged for so long. We have lots of time to tell them.”
“So?” he said. “I should think they’d be happy to hear about it. Won’t they?”
“Well, sure, I guess,” she said.
“You guess?”
“I mean…of course they would, but…you know. They might point out that I’m only a junior in college.”
“You’re twenty-one years old, for God’s sake. And I am twenty-three.”
“Yes, but—”
Just then Elaine arrived in the doorway, holding a can of root beer. She stopped short and looked at them. “Oops,” she said. “So sorry.” From the scornful smile on her face, you would have thought she had caught them stark naked.
Willa said, “What for?,” and shut her suitcase. “Let’s go,” she told Derek. She angled her suitcase past Elaine, who grudgingly stepped aside, and Derek picked up his bag and followed. So did Elaine, after a moment. Willa heard the pop of her root beer tab as she descended the stairs behind them.
In the living room, Willa’s mother was collecting scattered sections of the Sunday paper while Willa’s father stood in front of the TV gazing at a weather map. “You’ll be flying straight into a belt of thunderstorms, looks like,” he told Willa and Derek. “Ha! I knew you should’ve stayed through Easter Monday.”
Derek dropped his bag and said, “Mr. Drake. Mrs. Drake.”
It took no more than that to bring everything to a halt. Willa’s mother stopped folding the sports section and grew completely still. Willa’s father threw Derek a glance and then stepped forward to switch the TV off. Elaine, heading toward the dining room, stopped in her tracks and returned to stand in the living-room doorway, looking more interested than she had during any other point in their visit.
“Willa and I are engaged,” Derek said.
Nobody reacted. Not even Willa could tell what her parents were thinking. She set her suitcase down inch by inch, without a sound.
“We love each other,” Derek said, “and…we’ve decided, um, we want to spend the rest of our lives together.” Something in his delivery, the words tumbling forth in short bursts, suggested that he was speaking almost at random, trying to fill what was beginning to be a noticeable silence. “I’ve asked her and she—she said yes and she wants to wait till she graduates although me, I’m thinking this summer would be good; I mean, she could finish school in California just as well as at Kinney, so I’m hoping to talk her around, but in any case—”
Willa’s mother said, “Melvin?”
Willa’s father stirred, as if he were slowly waking up. He cleared his throat. “Well, now, ah, Derek,” he said, “that’s very nice news, of course, but you realize Willa is only—”
“Nice news?” Willa’s mother echoed. “You think it’s nice news that he wants to ‘talk her around’?”
Willa said, “No—”
And Derek said, “No, I just meant…I mean I was thinking we could discuss it together, like, but in any case—”
“Yes, forget about Willa’s side in all this,” her mother said. “Forget she’s not even through college yet and has barely passed her twenty-first birthday, because you, Mr. Wharton Business School Type, you with your quote-unquote executive position—”
“Now, hon,” Willa’s father said, “calm down, now.” Which he of all people should know was the wrong thing to tell her. “Now, we do have to accept the possibility that maybe Wills knows what she’s doing.”
Willa felt a bolt of panic shoot through her. She opened her mouth to speak, but then her mother told her father, “Oh, please.” And to Willa she said, “Do you want to be like your friend Sonya, or the Barnes girl, or Maddie Lennox? All those girls who got hitched in their teens and have a houseful of babies now?�
��
Willa said, “I’m not in my—”
“This is someone who called you a snippy little college girl!”
“A what?” Derek asked, and then, apparently recollecting, he said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Drake. I was not the one who called her that.” He spoke levelly, if a bit louder than usual. He didn’t seem fazed in the least, whereas even Willa’s father was sort of wincing and blinking in that way he did when he was just wishing this would all go away. “It was the man on the plane who called her that,” Derek said. “Or who maybe called her that. Who maybe thought of her as that.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?” Willa’s mother said. “You dismissed her story outright. She tells you a man aimed a gun at her and you just brush her off.”
Willa looked at Derek, because her mother was right, in fact. But Derek said, “Well, granted I didn’t get all dramatic about it. Not like you, Mrs. Drake, with your actressy ways and your ‘tempestuous’ personality, stealing the stage from some poor young crippled girl who was supposed to be the star.”
“That was the point, you fool,” Willa’s mother said. She actually seemed to be enjoying herself. She was smiling a terrible, bitter smile, and two patches like overbright rouge were showing on her sharp cheekbones. “Amanda’s supposed to steal the stage; that was the point of the play.”
Willa had never seen her mother expose her true self to outsiders before. She turned back to Derek, expecting him to wilt, but he was smiling too. Except his smile was a pleasant, relaxed-looking smile. “Amanda!” he said. “Try Lady Macbeth. Who else would serve rabbit on Easter Sunday?”
Willa stared at him. Elaine, raptly silent till now, made a sudden snorting sound. And then Willa’s father said, “Now, folks; look now. Can’t we sit down and talk this through?”
But Willa said, “Talk what through? I’m marrying him and that’s that.”
