Ladder of Years

by Anne Tyler

  One of the women on the couch said Binky must have grated her own lemon zest. “I can always tell fresh-grated zest,” she said. “It’s no use trying to substitute that brown dust that comes in bottles.” She licked crumbs off her fork in a contemplative way. Her face had gone past merely old to that stage where it seemed formed of disintegrating particles, without a single clear demarcation. Did there come a point, Delia wondered, after you’d outlived every one of your friends, when you began to believe you might be the first to escape death altogether?

  She relieved Binky of her cake knife and cut more slices, which she carried around on a platter in case people wanted seconds. In the bedroom, a young woman in a nurse’s white pantsuit was holding forth on various hospitals, referring familiarly to “Saint Joe” and “Holy Trin” while a circle of residents listened spellbound. Two men were playing chess in a corner; one of them asked Delia if he could take an extra piece of cake for his wife on Floor Four. Aileen, Delia’s former seatmate, was nodding and smiling as a fur-stoled woman described other weddings she’d been to. “And then Lois: she was a lucky one! Married a man with all his major appliances, including convection oven.”

  Noah walked in with a glass of champagne, which he tried to hide when he saw Delia. “Give me that,” she ordered.

  “Aw, Delia.”

  She took it from him and set it on a passing tray. “By the way,” she said, “where’s your mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t come upstairs?”

  He shrugged. “I guess she must have had other stuff to do,” he said. Then he turned on his heel and left the room before she could comment—not that she would have been so tactless.

  Binky’s sister, the bearer of the tray, tut-tutted. “I saw her walk out directly after the vows,” she said. “Her and her sister both. Doodoo, is that what they call her?”

  “Dudi.”

  “All this brouhaha about his family’s reaction! How about ours? We could have said plenty, trust me: marrying a man old enough to be her father.”

  “Well,” Delia said, “I’m just glad she and Nat found each other.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” the sister said, sighing.

  Then Nat popped up at Delia’s elbow. “Have you met my sister-in-law?” he asked her. “Bernice, my new sister-in-law. Can you imagine someone my age getting a brand-new sister-in-law?” He was exultant, his voice unsteady, his face so firm-skinned and glowing that he looked like a pretend old man made up for a high-school play. If he’d noticed his daughters’ disappearance, it hadn’t dampened his happiness.

  During the drive home, Delia told Noah she thought his mother was very pretty. In fact, this was not strictly true. She had decided Ellie had a garish quality; the high contrast of her coloring went over better on TV than in person. But she wanted an excuse to mention her. All Noah said in response was, “Yeah,” and he drummed his fingers and looked out the side window.

  “And you looked mighty handsome up there, too,” she said.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “You don’t believe me? Just watch,” she teased him. “The next wedding you’re in might very well be your own.”

  But he didn’t so much as smile. “Fat chance,” he said.

  “What—you’re not getting married?”

  “Me and Dad have blown it with women,” he said glumly. “There must be something about them we don’t understand.”

  In other circumstances, she might have been amused, but now she felt touched. She glanced at him. He went on staring out the window. Finally she reached over and gave him a pat on the knee, and they rode the rest of the way without speaking.

  16

  “If x is the age Jenny is now, and y is the age she was when she went to California …,” Delia said.

  T. J. Renfro put his head on the kitchen table.

  “Now, T.J., this is not so hard! See, we know that she was three years older than the girlfriend she was visiting in California, and we know that when her girlfriend was—”

  “This is not going to do me one bit of good in real life,” T.J. informed her in a smothered voice.

  He had the kind of haircut that seemed half finished—medium length on top but trailing long black oily strands in back. Both of his upper arms were braceleted with barbed-wire tattoos, and his black leather vest bore more zippers than you’d find in most people’s entire wardrobes. Unlike Delia’s other pupils, who met with her in the counseling room over at the high school, T.J. came to the house. He had been suspended till May 1 and was not allowed to set foot on school property; showed up instead at the Millers’ back door every Thursday afternoon at three o’clock. Delia didn’t want to know what he’d been suspended for.

  She told him, “Real life is full of problems like this! Finding the unknown quantity: there’s lots of times you’ll need to do that.”

  “Like I’m really going to walk up to some chick and ask how old she is,” T.J. said, raising his head, “and she’s going to say, ‘Well, ten years ago I was twice the age my third cousin was when …’”

  “Oh, now, you’re missing the point,” Delia said.

  “And how come this Jenny would visit someone three years younger anyway? That don’t make sense.”

  The phone rang, and Delia rose to answer it.

  “She probably just claimed she was visiting, and then hid out in some motel with her boyfriend,” T.J. said.

  Delia lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Hello!”

  Whoever it was hung up. “That’s happened a lot lately,” Delia said, hanging up herself. She returned to her chair.

  “It’s electrical backwash,” T.J. told her.

  “Backwash?”

  “If you don’t use your line awhile, it, like, develops all this pent-up power that spills out in this kind of like overflow and sets your phone to ringing.”

  Delia cocked her head.

  “Happens at my mom’s house once or twice a week,” T.J. told her.

  “Well, here it’s been happening more on the order of once or twice a day,” Delia said.

  The phone rang again. She said, “See?”

  “Just don’t answer.”

  “It kills me not to answer.”

  He tipped back in his chair and studied her. The phone gave a third ring, a fourth. Then the outside door burst open and Noah tumbled in, bringing along a gust of fresh air. “Hey, T.J.,” he said. He shed his school knapsack and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  In the pause that followed, T.J. and Delia watched him closely.

  “Naw, I don’t guess I can,” Noah said. He turned away from them. “I just can’t, that’s all.” Another pause. “It’s nothing like that, honest! Just I got all this homework and stuff. Well, I better go now. Bye.” He hung up.

  “Who was that?” Delia asked.

  “Nobody.”

  He slung his knapsack over one shoulder and walked off toward his room.

  T.J. and Delia looked at each other.

  ———

  The next afternoon, a cool, sunny Friday, Delia went with Vanessa to a knitwear sale at Young Mister. Spring would be arriving any minute now, and Noah had outgrown all last spring’s clothes. It was an excruciatingly slow trip, because Greggie was in the midst of his terrible twos and refused to ride in his stroller. He had to walk every inch of the way. Delia felt she had never seen Bay Borough in such detail—every plastic cup lid wheeling along the sidewalk, every sparrow pecking tinfoil in the gutter. They didn’t start heading back until nearly three o’clock. “Oh-oh,” Delia said, “look at the time. Noah will be home before I am.”

  “Isn’t he going to his mother’s?” Vanessa asked.

  “Not this week.”

  “I thought he went every Friday.”

  “Well, I guess something must have come up.”

  They had reached the corner where they separated, and Delia said, “Bye, Greggie. Bye, Vanessa.”

  “So lon
g, Dee,” Vanessa said. “Let’s ask Belle if she wants to get together over the weekend.”

  “Fine with me.”

  Belle was saving all her weekends for Mr. Lamb these days, but Delia had been ordered to keep that a secret.

  At the grade school, children were already pouring onto the playground. Delia didn’t try to find Noah, though. She knew he’d want to walk home with his friends. She sidestepped a runaway skateboard, smiled at a little girl collecting scattered papers, and politely ignored a mother and son quarreling next to their car.

  But wait. The son was Noah. The mother was Ellie.

  Wearing her cream-colored coat from the wedding but looking frazzled and disordered, Ellie was trying to wrestle Noah into the passenger seat. And Noah was pulling away from her, his jacket wrenched halfway off his arms. “Mom,” he kept saying. “Mom. Stop.”

  Delia said, “Noah?”

  They threw her an identical distracted stare and went on with their tussle. Ellie started mashing Noah’s head down the way policemen did on TV, guiding their handcuffed suspects into squad cars.

  “What’s happening here?” Delia asked. She made a grab for Ellie’s wrist. “Let go of him!”

  Ellie flung her off so violently that she knocked Delia in the face; her sharp-stoned ring grazed Delia’s forehead. Noah, meanwhile, managed to yank himself free. He stumbled several steps backward and adjusted his jacket. His knapsack was gaping open and spilling papers. (Those were the papers the little girl was collecting!) He wiped his fist across his nose and said, “Gee, Mom.”

  Ellie stood straighter, breathing harshly, glaring at him.

  Reverently, the little girl presented Noah with his papers. He took them without looking at them. Now Delia saw that two of his friends were loitering nearby—Kenny Moss and a second boy, whose name she couldn’t remember. They were watching but pretending not to, kicking the sidewalk. The other children, passing in groups, seemed unaware that anything was wrong.

  “I just wanted you to come visit! Like always! Just a normal Friday visit!” Ellie cried. “Is that too much to ask?” She turned to Delia. “Is that so—?”

  Something stopped her. Her mouth fell open.

  Noah said, “Gosh!” He was staring at Delia’s forehead. “Delia! Golly! You’re all bloody!”

  Delia raised her fingers to her forehead. They came away bright red. But she didn’t feel much pain—only the least little sting at that spot in her temple where the pulse beat. She said, “Oh, it’s nothing. I’ll just go home and—”

  But Noah’s eyes were huge, and Kenny Moss said, “Holy moley!” and gripped the other boy’s sleeve, and the little girl said, in an informative tone, “I pass out if I see blood.”

  She did seem about to pass out—her lips had an ashy pallor—and so Delia, attending to first things first, said crisply, “Don’t look, then.” She herself wasn’t dizzy in the slightest. This was plainly one of those wounds that appear much worse than they are. However, she was concerned about her clothes. “Somewhere here …,” she said, hunting through her purse for a tissue. Her Young Mister bag hindered her, and she passed it to Noah, leaving sticky red fingerprints across the scrunched top. “I know I must have a—”

  Soft, blossomy mounds of tissue were thrust under her chin—an offering from Ellie. “I am so, so sorry,” she was saying. “It was an accident! Believe me, Delia, I never meant to harm you.”

  “Well, I know that,” Delia said, accepting the tissues. She found it oddly flattering that Ellie called her by name. She pressed the tissues to her temple, and her pulse began to throb.

  “Oh, God, we have to get you to a doctor,” Ellie said.

  “I don’t need a doctor; goodness.”

  “You’re no judge of that! You’re not in your right mind,” Ellie said. Although it was Ellie who seemed unhinged, thrusting more handfuls of tissues at her (did she carry them loose in her pockets, or what?) and shrilly ordering the others about. “Move! Give us room. Noah, you ride in back; we’ll put Delia up in front.”

  “Isn’t there a school nurse or something? Why don’t we look for the nurse?” Delia asked.

  But Ellie said, “You don’t want to end up with a scar, do you? An ugly, disfiguring scar?”

  Which was something to consider; so Delia allowed herself to be shepherded toward the front seat. Noah, who had folded the seat forward so he could climb into the rear, straightened it for Delia. When she was settled, he leaned over her shoulder to offer her a gray sweatshirt from his knapsack. “Here,” he said. “You’re going through those hankies like a spigot.”

  She would have argued (blood was so hard to launder), but it was true she had used up the tissues. She pressed the sweatshirt to her forehead and breathed in its smell of clean sweat and gym shoes. Meanwhile Ellie slid behind the wheel and started the engine. “You’ll probably need stitches,” she said, pulling into traffic. “Oh, lately it seems everything I touch goes galloping off in every direction! Leaves me staring after it amazed!”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Delia told her. She took a peek from under the sweatshirt. Up close, Ellie seemed more likable. Her lipstick was worn to a tired outline, and her eyes sagged slightly at the outer corners.

  “I’m not myself these days,” Ellie said. “You hear people say that all the time, but up till now I’d assumed it was a figure of speech. Now I stand off to one side looking at myself like a whole other person, and I ask, ‘What could she be thinking of?’”

  They turned left, onto Weber Street. Delia folded the sweatshirt to a new section. She was beginning to understand why you often saw red roses planted near gray stone walls. The bloodstains looked so vivid against the sweatshirt fabric, she would have liked to show the others. But Ellie was still talking away. “I admit it was me who walked out on the marriage,” she said. (Delia replayed the last few sentences, wondering if she had missed some key transition.) “You don’t have to remind me! I started picturing how I’d get to heaven and God would say, ‘Such a waste; I sent you into the world and you didn’t even make use of it, just sat there in one spot complaining you were bored.’ So I walked out. But when I saw you at the wedding, when I saw how—well, I guess I thought you’d be older and fatter and wearing a zip-front dress or something. I know I made a scene, phoning Joel like I did. …”

  Ellie had phoned Joel?

  “In fact I watched myself dialing, and I said, ‘What a dumb thing to do!’ But I went right on doing it. And I’d planned to be Madam Iceberg. ‘I’ve been thinking, Joel,’ I’d say. ‘Perhaps you should grant me custody, now you’ve got a female companion.’ But I guess he told you how it came out. I hear his voice, I’m like a woman possessed. ‘How dare you do this to Noah! Exposing an innocent child to that tawdry little love nest you’ve set up!’”

  Love nest! Delia was thrilled.

  “And if that wasn’t bad enough, then I go and drag Noah in too. I’m sorry, honey!” Ellie said, addressing the rearview mirror. But she didn’t wait for Noah’s reaction. “And you know how heartless kids can be. The minute you show you’re upset, they pretend you don’t exist. They stare right through you. They make up all these excuses why they can’t come and visit you.”

  “Mom,” Noah said.

  Delia was curious to hear how he would handle this, but all he said was, “Mom, you just passed Dr. Norman’s.”

  “Yes, I know,” Ellie said. They were on Border Street now, heading toward Highway 380. “Every morning I’d wake up saying, ‘Today I’ll get ahold of myself. I’ll just put it out of my mind,’ I’d say, but there you were, regardless: this mystery woman no one knew a thing about, the very type Joel would fall for. I bet you speak perfect English too, don’t you?”

  “You have it all wrong,” Delia said, much as she hated to. “It’s not the way you—”

  But Ellie was turning north on 380, and Noah broke in to ask, “Mom? Where you going?”

  “There are scads of doctors in Easton,” Ellie said.

  “
Easton!” Noah and Delia said together.

  “Well, you surely don’t think we could use Dr. Norman. He’s right there in town! Anybody in town will believe I did this on purpose.”

  “Can’t we just tell him you didn’t?” Delia asked.

  “Ha! You don’t know Bay Borough like I do. People there make a scandal out of the simplest little trifle.”

  “Maybe a drugstore, then,” Delia said. She was beginning to feel uneasy. “All I need is a bandage.”

  “Oh, Delia, Delia, Delia,” Ellie said. “You are so naive. Sure as you live, the pharmacist would be some Underwood graduate who couldn’t wait to get on the phone and start blabbing. ‘Guess what!’” she mimicked. “‘Mr. Miller’s demented wife tried to murder his girlfriend.’”

  “I’m not his—”

  “I bet you never say ‘share,’ do you?”

  “Share?”

  “As in communicate. As in, ‘So-and-so shared his feelings with me.’ Joel used to gnash his teeth when I said that. And he had this thing about putting in the objects of my verbs. ‘Enjoy what?’ he’d ask me. Or, ‘Take care of whom? Where’s the end of your sentence, Ellie?’”

  Delia watched a field of dead autos slide past. In back, Noah was silent.

  “Funny how men always worry ahead of time that marriage might confine them,” Ellie said. “Women don’t give it a thought. It’s afterwards it hits them. Stuck for life! Imprisoned! Trapped forever with a man who won’t let you say ‘parenting.’”

  She braked; they had reached the stoplight at Highway 50. While they waited for it to turn green, she started digging through her purse. “Do you have any cash?” she asked Delia. “I don’t want to pay with a check. Even over in Easton, my name might ring a bell.”

  She was crazy, Delia decided. So far she had been able to see Ellie’s side of things—had sympathized, even. But now she had a sense of panic. And besides that, her cut was starting to hurt. She imagined she could actually feel its widening mouth, the edges hardening into a permanent scar.