Ladder of Years

by Anne Tyler

  In aisle 7 they zipped through the gourmet section—anchovy paste, smoked oysters—and arrived at baby foods, where Delia collected herself enough to remember she needed strained spinach. She slowed to study the rows of little jars. “Not those!” Adrian hissed. They raced on, leaving behind aisle 7 and careening into 8. “Sorry,” he said. “I just thought if Rosemary saw you buying baby food …”

  If she saw her buying baby food, she’d think Delia was just a housewife with an infant waiting at home. Ironically, though, Delia had long passed the infant stage. To suspect her of having a child that young was to flatter her. All she needed the spinach for was her mint pea soup. But she didn’t bother explaining that and instead selected a can of chicken broth. “Oh,” Adrian said, traveling past her, “consommé! I meant to buy some.”

  He dropped a tin in her cart—a fancy brand with a sleek white label. Then he wandered on, hands jammed flat in his rear pockets. Come to think of it, he reminded Delia of her first real boyfriend—in fact, her only boyfriend, not counting her husband. Will Britt had possessed this same angularity, which had seemed graceful at some moments and ungainly at others; and he had cocked his elbows behind him in just this way, like knobby, sharp wings, and his ears had stuck out a bit too. It was a relief to find that Adrian’s ears stuck out. She distrusted men who were too handsome.

  At the end of the aisle they looked in both directions. No telling where Rosemary might pop up next, with that carefree, untrammeled tote basket. But the coast was clear, and Delia nosed her cart toward paper goods. “What,” Adrian said, “you want to buy more?”

  Yes, she did. She had barely passed the halfway mark. But she saw his point. The longer they hung around, the greater his chances of another confrontation. “We’ll leave,” she decided. She started for the nearest checkout counter, but Adrian, lacing his fingers through the grid of the cart, drew it toward the express lanes. “One, two, three …” She counted her purchases aloud. “We can’t go there! I’ve got sixteen, seventeen …”

  He pulled the cart into the fifteen-item lane, behind an old woman buying nothing but a sack of dog chow. He started dumping noodle boxes onto the counter. Ah, well. Delia rummaged through her bag for her checkbook. The old woman in front of them, meanwhile, was depositing bits of small change in the cashier’s palm. She handed over a penny and then, after a search, another penny. A third penny had a piece of lint stuck to it, and she plucked that away painstakingly. Adrian gave an exasperated sigh. “I forgot cat food,” Delia told him. She hadn’t a hope in this world that he would volunteer to go back for it; she just thought a flow of talk might settle him down some. “Seeing that dog chow reminded me, we’re almost out,” she said. “Oh, never mind. I’ll send Ramsay for it later.”

  The old woman was hunting a fourth penny. She was positive, she said, that she had another one somewhere.

  “Ramsay!” Adrian repeated to himself. He sighed again—or no, this time he was laughing. “I bet you live in Roland Park,” he told Delia.

  “Well, yes, I do.”

  “I knew it! Everybody in Roland Park has a last name for a first name.”

  “So?” she said, stung. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “It isn’t even true,” she said. “Why, I know lots of people who—”

  “Don’t take offense! I live in Roland Park myself,” he said. “It’s just pure luck I wasn’t named … oh, Bennington, or McKinney; McKinney was my mother’s maiden name. I bet your husband’s mother’s … and if we decide against the blancmange tonight we can always have it tomorrow night, don’t you think?”

  She felt dislocated for a second, until she understood that Rosemary must be in earshot again. Sure enough: a tote basket, still loaded, arrived on the counter behind her own groceries. By now the old woman had moved away, tottering under her burden of dog chow, and the cashier was asking them, “Plastic bags, or paper?”

  “Plastic, please,” Adrian said.

  Delia opened her mouth to object (she generally chose paper, herself), but she didn’t want to contradict Adrian in front of his wife.

  Adrian said, “Delia, I don’t believe you’ve met my …”

  Delia turned around, already plastering a pleasantly surprised smile on her face.

  “My, ah, Rosemary,” Adrian said, “and her, ah, Skipper. This is Delia Grinstead.”

  Rosemary wasn’t smiling at all, which made Delia feel foolish, but Skipper gave her an amiable nod. He kept his arms folded across his chest—short, muscular arms, heavily furred, bulging from the sleeves of his polo shirt. “Any relation to Dr. Grinstead?” he asked her.

  “Yes! He’s my … he was my … he’s my husband,” she said. How to explain the existence of a husband, in the present situation?

  But Skipper seemed to take this in stride. He told Rosemary, “Dr. Grinstead’s my mother’s GP. Been treating her forever. Right?” he asked Delia.

  “Right,” she agreed, not having the faintest idea. Rosemary, meanwhile, went on studying her coolly. She carried her head at a deliberate tilt, accentuating the asymmetrical hairdo with its dramatic downward slant toward her chin. It was none of Delia’s business, of course, but privately she thought Adrian deserved somebody more likable. She thought even Skipper deserved somebody more likable. She wished she had worn high heels this morning, and a dressier dress.

  “Dr. Grinstead is just about the last man in Baltimore who makes house calls,” Skipper was telling Rosemary.

  “Well, only if it’s absolutely essential,” Delia said. A reflex: she never gave up trying to protect her husband from his patients.

  Behind her, the scanner said peep … peep … peep, registering her groceries. The music had stopped playing several minutes back, as Delia just now noticed, and the murmuring of shoppers elsewhere in the store sounded hushed and ominous.

  “That’ll be thirty-three forty,” the cashier announced.

  Delia turned to fill in her check and found Adrian handing over the money. “Oh!” she said, preparing to argue. But then she grew conscious of Rosemary listening.

  Adrian flashed her a wide, sweet smile and accepted his change. “Good seeing you,” he told the other couple. He walked on out, pushing the cart, with Delia trailing behind.

  It had been raining off and on for days, but this morning had dawned clear and the parking lot had a rinsed, fresh, soft look under a film of lemony sunlight. Adrian halted the cart at the curb and lifted out two of the grocery bags, leaving the third for Delia. Next came the problem of whose car to head for. He was already starting toward his own, which was evidently parked somewhere near the dry cleaner’s, when she stopped him. “Wait,” she said. “I’m right here.”

  “But what if they see us? We can’t leave in two different cars!”

  “Well, I do have a life to get back to,” Delia snapped. This whole business had gone far enough, it occurred to her. She was missing her baby-food spinach and her cornflakes and untold other items on account of a total stranger. She flung open the trunk of her Plymouth.

  “Oh, all right,” Adrian said. “What we’ll do is load these groceries very, very slowly, and by that time they’ll have driven away. They didn’t have so much to ring up: two steaks, two potatoes, a head of lettuce, and a box of after-dinner mints. That won’t take long.”

  Delia was astonished at his powers of observation. She watched him arrange his bags in her trunk, after which he consumed a good half minute repositioning a small box of something. Orzo, it was—a most peculiar, tiny-sized pasta that she’d often noticed on the shelf but never bought. She had thought it resembled rice, in which case why not serve rice instead, which was surely more nutritious? She handed him the bag she was holding, and he settled that with elaborate care between the first two. “Are they coming out yet?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, looking past him toward the store. “Listen, I owe you some money.”

  “My treat.”

  “No, really, I have to pay
you back. Only I planned to write a check and I don’t have any cash. Would you accept a check? I could show you my driver’s license,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “I’m serious,” she told him. “If you don’t mind taking a—”

  Then she caught sight of Skipper and Rosemary emerging from the supermarket. Skipper hugged a single brown paper bag. Rosemary carried nothing but a purse the size of a sandwich, on a glittery golden chain.

  “Is it them?” Adrian asked.

  “It’s them.”

  He bent inside her trunk and started rearranging groceries again. “Tell me when they’re gone,” he said.

  The couple crossed to a low red sports car. Rosemary was at least Skipper’s height if not taller, and she had the slouching, indifferent gait of a runway model. If she had walked into a wall, her hipbones would have hit first.

  “Are they looking our way?” Adrian asked.

  “I don’t think they see us.”

  Skipper opened the passenger door, and Rosemary folded herself out of sight. He handed in the sack of groceries and shut the door, strode to the driver’s side, slid in and started the engine. Only then did he shut his own door. With a tightly knit, snarling sound, the little car spun around and buzzed off.

  “They’re gone,” Delia said.

  Adrian closed the trunk lid. He seemed older now. For the first time, Delia saw the fragile lines etched at the corners of his mouth.

  “Well,” he said sadly.

  It seemed crass to mention money again, but she had to say, “About the check …”

  “Please. I owe you,” he said. “I owe you more than that. Thanks for going along with me on this.”

  “It was nothing,” she told him. “I just wish there’d been, oh, somebody really appropriate.”

  “Appropriate?”

  “Somebody … you know,” she said. “As glamorous as your wife.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Why, you’re very pretty! You have such a little face, like a flower.”

  She felt herself blushing. He must have thought she was fishing for compliments. “Anyhow, I’m glad I could help out,” she said. She backed away from him and opened her car door. “Bye, now!”

  “Goodbye,” he said. “Thanks again.”

  As if he had been her host, he went on standing there while she maneuvered out of the parking slot. Naturally she made a mess of it, knowing he was watching. She cut her wheel too sharply, and the power-steering belt gave an embarrassing screech. But finally the car was free and she rolled away. Her rearview mirror showed Adrian lifting a palm in farewell, holding it steady until she turned south at the light.

  Halfway home, she had a sudden realization: she should have given him the groceries he had picked out. Good heavens—all that pasta, those little grains of orzo, and now she remembered his consommé too. Consommé madrilene: she wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it. She was driving away with property that belonged to someone else, and it was shameful how pleased she felt, and how lucky, and how rich.

  2

  The trouble with plastic bags was, those convenient handles tempted you to carry too many at once. Delia had forgotten that. She remembered halfway across her front yard, when the crooks of her fingers began to ache. She hadn’t been able to bring the car around to the rear because someone’s station wagon was blocking the driveway. Nailed to the trunk of the largest oak was a rusty metal sign directing patients to park on the street, but people tended to ignore it.

  She circled the front porch and picked her way through the scribble of spent forsythia bushes at the side. This was a large house but shabby, its brown shingles streaked with mildew and its shutters snaggletoothed where the louvers had fallen out over the years. Delia had never lived anywhere else. Neither had her father, for that matter. Her mother, an import from the Eastern Shore, had died of kidney failure before Delia could remember, leaving her in the care of her father and her two older sisters. Delia had played hopscotch on the parquet squares in the hall while her father doctored his patients in the glassed-in porch off the kitchen, and she had married his assistant beneath the sprawling brass chandelier that reminded her to this day of a daddy longlegs. Even after the wedding she had not moved away but simply installed her husband among her sweet-sixteen bedroom furniture, and once her children were born it was not uncommon for a patient to wander out of the waiting room calling, “Delia? Where are you, darlin’? Just wanted to see how those precious little babies were getting along.”

  The cat was perched on the back stoop, meowing at her reproachfully. His short gray fur was flattened here and there by drops of water. “Didn’t I tell you?” Delia scolded as she let him in. “Didn’t I warn you the grass would still be wet?” Her shoes were soaked just from crossing the lawn, the thin soles cold and papery-feeling. She stepped out of them as soon as she entered the kitchen. “Well, hi there!” she said to her son. He sat slumped over the table in his pajamas, buttering a piece of toast. She placed her bags on the counter and said, “Fancy finding you awake so early!”

  “It’s not like I had any choice,” he told her glumly.

  He was her youngest child and the one who most resembled her, she had always thought (with his hair the light-brown color and frazzled texture of binder’s twine, his freckled white face shadowed violet beneath the eyes), but last month he had turned fifteen, and all at once she saw more of Sam in him. He had shot up to nearly six feet, and his pointy chin had suddenly squared, and his hands had grown muscular and disconcertingly competent-looking. Even the way he held his butter knife suggested some new authority.

  His voice was Sam’s too: deep but fine-grained, not subject to the cracks and creaks his brother had gone through. “I hope you bought cornflakes,” he told her.

  “Why, no, I—”

  “Aw, Mom!”

  “But wait till you hear why I didn’t,” she said. “The funniest thing, Carroll! This real adventure. I was standing in the produce section, minding my own business—”

  “There’s not one decent thing in this house to eat.”

  “Well, you don’t usually want breakfast on a Saturday.”

  He scowled at her. “Try telling Ramsay that,” he said.

  “Ramsay?”

  “He’s the one who woke me. Came stumbling into the room in broad daylight, out all night with his lady friend. No way could I get back to sleep after that.”

  Delia turned her attention to the grocery bags. (She knew where this conversation was headed.) She started rummaging through them as if the cornflakes might emerge after all. “But let me tell you my adventure,” she said over her shoulder. “Out of the blue, this man is standing next to me. … Good-looking? He looked like my very first sweetheart, Will Britt. I don’t believe I ever mentioned Will to you.”

  “Mom,” Carroll said. “When are you going to let me move across the hall?”

  “Oh, Carroll.”

  “Nobody else I know has to room with their brother.”

  “Now, now. Plenty of people in this world have to room with whole families,” she told him.

  “Not with their boozehead college-boy brother, though. Not when there’s another room, perfectly empty, right across the hall.”

  Delia set down the box of orzo and faced him squarely. She noticed that he needed a haircut, but this was not the moment to point that out. “Carroll, I’m sorry,” she said, “but I am just not ready.”

  “Aunt Eliza’s ready! Why aren’t you? Aunt Liza was Grandpa’s daughter too, and she says of course I should have his room. She doesn’t understand what’s stopping me.”

  “Oh, listen to us!” Delia said gaily. “Spoiling such a pretty day with disagreements! Where’s your father? Is he seeing a patient?”

  Carroll didn’t answer. He had dropped his toast to his plate, and now he sat tipping his chair back defiantly, no doubt adding more dents to the linoleum. Delia sighed.

  “Sweetie,” she said, “I do know how you feel. And pret
ty soon you can have the room, I promise. But not just yet! Not right now! Right now it still smells of his pipe tobacco.”

  “It won’t once I’m living there,” Carroll said.

  “But that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Shoot, I’ll take up smoking, then.”

  She waved his words away with a dutiful laugh. “Anyhow,” she said. “Is your father with a patient?”

  “Naw.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s out running.”

  “He’s what?”

  Carroll picked up his toast again and chomped down on it noisily.

  “He’s doing what?”

  “He’s running, Mom.”

  “Well, didn’t you at least offer to go with him?”

  “He’s only running around the Gilman track, for gosh sakes.”

  “I asked you children; I begged you not to let him go alone. What if something happens and no one’s around to help?”

  “Fat chance, on the Gilman track,” Carroll said.

  “He shouldn’t be running anyway. He ought to be walking.”

  “Running’s good for him,” Carroll said. “Look. He’s not worried. His doctor’s not worried. So what’s your problem, Mom?”

  Delia could have come up with so many responses to that; all she did was press a hand to her forehead.

  These were the facts she had neglected to tell that young man in the supermarket: She was a sad, tired, anxious, forty-year-old woman who hadn’t had a champagne brunch in decades. And her husband was even older, by a good fifteen years, and just this past February he had suffered a bout of severe chest pain. Angina, they said in the emergency room. And now she was terrified any time he went anywhere alone, and she hated to let him drive, and she kept finding excuses not to make love for fear it would kill him, and at night while he slept she lay awake, tensing every muscle between each of his long, slow breaths.

  And not only were her children past infancy; they were huge. They were great, galumphing, unmannerly, supercilious creatures—Susie a Goucher junior consumed by a baffling enthusiasm for various outdoor sports; Ramsay a Hopkins freshman on the brink of flunking out, thanks to the twenty-eight-year-old single-parent girlfriend he had somehow acquired. (And both of them, Susie and Ramsay both, were miffed beyond belief that the family finances forced them to live at home.) And Delia’s baby, her sweet, winsome Carroll, had been replaced by this rude adolescent, flinching from his mother’s hugs and criticizing her clothes and rolling his eyes disgustedly at every word she uttered.