Ladder of Years

by Anne Tyler

  They would have to make a run for it, as soon as she could safely snatch Noah out of the back. Maybe when they got to the doctor’s. If they got to the doctor’s; for here they sat, on and on, at this eternal red light. “Green light, green light,” she urged. She leaned forward, as if that would hurry things.

  Ellie, misunderstanding, said, “Oh, sorry,” and took her foot off the brake. They zoomed onto Highway 50, and an oil truck, horn blaring wildly, swerved around them and careened down the wrong side of the road. Ellie screamed. Delia was too terrified to scream. They veered onto the shoulder and bounced over a stretch of dry grass before coming to a stop.

  “I thought you said the light was green!” Ellie shrieked.

  “I only meant—oh, Lord,” Delia said. She turned to check on Noah. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  He swallowed and then nodded.

  Surreptitiously, in a movement that might have been oiled, Delia felt for her door handle. She gave it a smooth nudge downward and let the door inch open. Then she shouted, “Out, Noah! Quick!” and sprang from the car, at the same time slamming her seat forward so Noah could follow. He did, luckily. He had good reflexes. He landed almost on top of her, because she happened to step directly into some kind of hole or ditch concealed by the flattened grass. Her right ankle twisted beneath her and Noah came bruising into her shoulder, and of course she still had the sweatshirt pressed to the wound on her head, but at least they were safe.

  Ellie, meanwhile, had opened her own door, causing yet another truck to honk as it passed. The bleat of the horn traveled straight through Delia’s chest. All at once her heart caved in, as if only now receiving word of the danger. Why, they had run a red light! Whizzed into highspeed traffic without a glance in either direction! Her skin began to tingle with the memory of it. She imagined that her outermost surface had actually been brushed by their near miss.

  “We could have been killed!” she cried, and Ellie, rushing toward her, called, “I know! I can’t believe we’re still alive!” She flung her arms around Delia and Noah. Noah said, “Mom,” and struggled free, but Delia hugged her back. Both women were slightly teary. Ellie kept saying, “Oh, God, oh, God,” and laughing and dabbing her eyes.

  “Mom,” Noah said again, from the sidelines. “Can we just go to Dr. Norman, please?”

  “We’ll tell him I bumped my head,” Delia said. “He won’t think a thing about it.”

  “Well, you’re right,” Ellie said. “We’ll do that. Come on, if I can get up the nerve to drive again.”

  So they all climbed back in the car, which turned out to be a Plymouth, just a year or two newer than Delia’s Plymouth; and Ellie waited till there wasn’t another vehicle in sight before inching out onto the highway and executing a U-turn. Not until they were traveling back down 380 did she venture to speak, even; she was so intent on her driving. Then she asked Noah what he planned to tell his father.

  Noah let a long pause develop, but finally he said, “Same thing we tell Dr. Norman, I guess. You gave us a ride home from school? Delia banged her head some way?”

  “I knocked against the car door as I got in,” Delia suggested.

  “Oh, good,” Ellie said, and her hands relaxed on the wheel.

  Most likely it was Delia she had been worrying about. She must have known that Noah wouldn’t tattle; he had that disconcertingly cold, stoic secretiveness you often see in children of troubled marriages.

  “And in fact that’s almost what happened,” Ellie said. “We just got caught up in one of those, what you might call flurries of events, right? Am I right?”

  “Well, of course,” Delia told her.

  Ellie slowed for the turn onto Border Street. “You may not believe this,” she said, “but I’m a very stable person as a rule. It’s just that lately, I’ve been under a lot of stress. Oh, working in front of the camera is way more pressure than I thought it would be! I have to watch my weight every instant, make sure I get my full eight hours’ sleep, take care of my complexion. See this?” She was in the midst of parallel parking, but she paused to grab a strand of her hair. “Bleached, stripped, body-waved, color-treated …” She pulled the strand taut and released it. “See how it stretches out so long and thin and then just snaps, boing? That’s not hair anymore; it’s, I don’t know, Silly Putty. And if only they’d give me a leave of absence till my eyebrows can grow back in!”

  One tire scraped the curb. “Besides which there’s my nutso sister losing her marbles over Dad’s marriage,” she said, “and this leak in my apartment ceiling nobody knows where from, and not to mention Dad himself. What business does he have, starting all over at his age? He’s sixty-seven years old and in constant pain to boot, were you aware of that? Why do you suppose he keeps Noah’s visits so short? His favorite grandchild, but any more than an hour and Dad’s exhausted!”

  “Oh, the poor man,” Delia said. She opened the door and got out, still holding the sweatshirt to her head. Somehow the urgency of their errand had receded, she noticed. She flipped the seat forward for Noah, and he piled out after her.

  “When I think how hard I worked moving him into that place!” Ellie told her, slamming her own door. “All those boxes I packed! I felt like I was sending him off to camp or something. ‘Do you have the right kind of clothes for this? What will the other kids be wearing?’ And now they’re threatening to evict him.”

  “Evict him!” Delia said.

  They were climbing the steps of a large frame house with a wraparound porch. Noah led the way. Delia trailed behind because her ankle was slowing her down. She called, “I thought they said he could stay on after he married.”

  “That was before they found out his wife was expecting,” Ellie said.

  Delia halted on the top porch step and stared at her. Even Noah stared. “Expecting what?” Delia asked foolishly.

  “Use your head, Delia! Why do you suppose they moved the wedding up to March?”

  “Well, because … did they tell you this? Or are you just surmising?”

  “Darn right they told me,” Ellie said. “Made a big announcement of it, just last week. Dad asks Binky, ‘Angel? Are you going to break the news, or am I?’ and Binky says, ‘Oh, you do it, honeybunch.’ Don’t you want to just gag? That kind of talk seems so, I don’t know, fake, when it’s a second marriage. So Dad clears his throat and says, ‘Ellie,’ he says; says, ‘you’re going to have a sister.’ Well, I was kind of slow on the uptake. I said, ‘I already have a sister. Several.’ He said, ‘I mean another sister. We’re pregnant.’ That’s an exact quote. ‘We,’ he said. You can bet he didn’t word it that way the first four times around.”

  “But … when is this going to happen?” Delia asked.

  “September.”

  “September!”

  Majestically, Ellie sailed through the front door. Delia stood on the porch with her mouth open. Binky had always been a rotund little person, rotund in the stomach as well, but … She looked over at Noah. “Did you know about this?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Well,” she said. “So you’ll have a … baby aunt! Imagine!”

  As she limped through the door, she heard Ellie’s humorless snicker.

  This was the first time Delia had been to Dr. Norman’s office, although his telephone number was posted next to the Millers’ kitchen phone. The instant she smelled that mixture of floor wax and isopropyl alcohol, she was overcome by a settling-in sensation—a feeling that she had returned to her rightful place; that all other places were counterfeit, temporary, foreign to her true nature. She stopped short in the foyer (stringy Oriental rug, ginger-jar lamp on a table), until Ellie took her arm and steered her toward the waiting room. “Is he in?” she asked the woman at the desk. The woman was much older than Delia and fifty pounds heavier, but still somebody Delia could identify with, seeing her fingers poised on the chrome-rimmed keys of an ancient typewriter. “We’ve got an emergency here!” Ellie told her.

  Oh,
yes, the emergency. Delia had almost forgotten. While Ellie explained the circumstances (“sharp metal corner on the … nothing I could do … tried to warn her but …”), Delia unstuck the sweatshirt from her forehead and discovered she was no longer bleeding. The bloodstains on the shirt had dried to a dull, blackish color. She glanced toward the other patients. Two women and a small girl sat watching her with interest, and she hastily clapped the sweatshirt back on her temple.

  Dr. Norman was just hanging up the phone when the secretary led them in. He was a dumpy man with a flounce of white curls above his ears. “What have we here?” he asked, and he rose and came around the desk to peel away the sweatshirt with practiced fingers. His breath smelled of pipe tobacco. Delia would have liked to take hold of his hand and cradle it against her cheek. “Hmm,” he said, peering. “Well, nothing you’ll die of.”

  “Will it leave a scar?” Delia asked him.

  “It shouldn’t. Hard to tell for sure till I get it cleaned up.”

  “Of course I did everything humanly possible,” Ellie said. “Warned her over and over again. ‘Watch yourself getting in, Dee,’ I told her; if I told her once, I told her half a dozen times—”

  Dr. Norman said, with a touch of impatience, “Yes, fine, Ellie, I understand,” and Ellie shut up. “Come next door,” he told Delia. He ushered her into an adjoining room. Ellie and Noah followed, which may not have been what he had intended.

  This second room held an examining table upholstered in cracked black leather. Delia boosted herself nimbly onto the end of it and settled her handbag in her lap. While Dr. Norman rummaged in a metal drawer the color of condensed milk, he asked Ellie about the weather; he asked Noah about his softball team; he told Delia he had heard she was a ba-a-ad tutor.

  “Bad!” Delia said.

  “Good, that means.” He looked up from the rubber gloves he was slipping on. “In T. J. Renfro’s language, ‘bad’ is good, and so is ‘wicked.’ You teach a wicked equation, he says.”

  “Oh,” Delia said, relieved.

  Ellie, who had been studying a poster on the Heimlich maneuver, looked over at her. “You tutor at Underwood?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She sniffed. “Joel must be in heaven,” she said. “He was always after me to volunteer.”

  Dr. Norman sent Ellie a quick glance that she probably didn’t notice. Then he told Noah, “Excuse me, son,” and stepped around him to peer again at Delia’s forehead. She stilled her swinging feet as he came close. “This’ll smart some,” he said, tearing open an antiseptic wipe. The keen, authoritative smell filled her with longing. I’m really not just a mere patient, she could have told him. I know this office top to bottom! I know you’ll sit down to supper tonight and tell your family that that Ellie Miller sure acts mighty possessive of Joel, considering they’re separated. I know you’ll say you finally got to meet that live-in woman of his, and depending on how discreet you are, you might even voice some suspicion as to exactly how I was injured. Don’t think I’m one of those outsiders who can’t see beyond the white coat!

  But of course she said nothing, and Dr. Norman swabbed her wound and then laid dots of rubbery warmth on either side of it as he tested it with his fingertips. “What you’ve got,” he said, “is a superficial scratch across the forehead, but a fairly deep gash at the temple. No need for stitches, though, and I doubt there’ll be a scar if we keep the edges together while it heals.” He turned back to the cabinet. “We’ll just apply a butterfly closure. This nifty type of bandage that …”

  Yes, Delia knew what a butterfly was—had plastered more than a few onto her own children’s injuries. She shut her eyes as he set it in place. Next to her she heard Noah breathing; he was leaning in close to watch. “Cool!” he said.

  “Now, if you want I could prescribe a pain medication,” Dr. Norman said, “but I don’t believe—”

  “It hardly hurts at all,” Delia told him, opening her eyes. “I won’t need anything.”

  He scrawled a note for his secretary before he showed her out, and clapped Noah on the shoulder, and said, “Ellie, always good to see your clothes hanging so well on you.”

  “Oh, stop,” Ellie said. She told Delia, “Everybody pokes fun at this remark I made in Boardwalk Bulletin.”

  Delia’s only response was, “Oh?” because she didn’t want to let on she’d read it.

  “But I was misquoted!” Ellie said. “Or at least, I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was, I dress economically.”

  She was still going on about that—telling Noah that this skirt, for instance, had cost thirteen ninety-five at Teenage World—when they reached the reception desk, which left Delia to pay the bill. She did think Ellie might have offered. But she had planned to decline anyhow, and so she held her tongue.

  Out on the porch, she folded the sweatshirt and stuffed it in her bag. Then she followed Ellie and Noah down the steps. Ellie was discussing the clothing budget of someone named Doris. Doris? Oh, yes, the anchorwoman at WKMD. “What she spends on headbands alone,” Ellie said, “to say nothing of those scarves she wears to hide her scraggy neck …”

  Delia was reflecting that she should have accepted that prescription after all, not for her forehead but for her ankle. She had completely neglected to mention twisting her ankle. She limped painfully to the car and fell with a thud into the passenger seat.

  “So I guess you want to go home now,” Ellie said.

  “Yes, please,” Delia told her.

  But Ellie had been speaking to Noah. “Honey?” she said, watching his face in the rearview mirror.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Don’t want to change your mind and visit me?”

  “I’ve got this history test to study for.”

  Ellie’s shoulders slumped. She didn’t point out that he could do that anytime over the weekend.

  They cruised down Weber Street, passing Copp Catering where Belle had bought Thanksgiving dinner, and the Sub Tub, where all the Underwood students headed for snacks after school. In Ellie’s company, Delia felt that Bay Borough took on a different shading. It didn’t look as happy as it usually did. The women walking home with their grocery bags seemed unknowingly ironic, like those plastic-faced, smiling housewives in kitchen-appliance ads from the fifties. Delia shook off the thought and turned to Ellie. “Well!” she said. “Maybe I’ll run into you at your father’s sometime.”

  “If I ever go back there,” Ellie said gloomily.

  “Oh, you have to go back! Why wouldn’t you? He’s such a pleasure to talk to.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Ellie said. “You’re not his daughter.”

  She turned onto Pendle Street, braked for a jaywalking collie, and pulled into the Millers’ driveway. (The glance she shot toward the front windows could have meant nothing at all.) “Bye, No-No,” she said, blowing her son a kiss. “Delia, sorry again about the whatever.”

  “That’s all right,” Delia said.

  Limping after Noah up the sidewalk, she remembered where she’d heard that phrase of Ellie’s before. “Easy for you,” Delia’s sisters used to tell her. They said, “Naturally you get along with Dad. You arrived so late, is why. You don’t have so much to hold against him.”

  But they never specified just what they held against him themselves. They hadn’t been able to name it even when she asked, and she would be willing to bet that Ellie couldn’t either.

  When Delia changed into the shoes she wore around the house, she found that the strap of her pump had left a groove across her right instep. Her foot was so swollen, in fact, that she seemed to be wearing a ghost pump, pressing into her flesh. And her anklebone had become a mere dent. She doubted anything was broken, though. She could still wriggle her toes.

  She drew a dishpan of cold water, added a few ice cubes, and sat down on a kitchen chair to let the ankle soak. And what else should she do for it? All those times she’d heard Sam advising his patients; you’d think she would remember. There
was a mnemonic: R.I.C.E., he always told them. She tried it aloud. “Rest, ice …” But what was the C for? Caution? Coddling? She tried again. “Rest, ice …”

  “Rest, ice, compression, elevation,” Joel told her, setting his briefcase on the counter. “What happened to you? You look like a war orphan.”

  “Oh,” Delia said, “you know that sharp corner they have on car doors …” Then she realized that this in no way explained her ankle. “It’s just been one of those days,” she finished vaguely.

  He didn’t pursue it. He opened an overhead cabinet and felt for something on the top shelf. “I know we have a first-aid kit,” he said. “I had to take a course in—Here we go.” He pulled out a gray metal tackle box. “When you’re through soaking, I’ll tape it.”

  “Oh, I’m through,” Delia said. She should probably allow more time, but the ice was making her shiver. She lifted her foot and patted it dry with a dish towel. Joel bent over it. He whistled.

  “Maybe you ought to get that x-rayed,” he said. “Are you sure it’s not broken?”

  “Pretty sure. Everything works,” Delia told him.

  Moving aside the dishpan, he knelt and started unrolling a strip of flesh-colored elastic. Delia felt self-conscious about the puffiness of her ankle and the dead blue of her skin, but he showed no reaction. He began wrapping her foot, crisscrossing her instep, working his way upward in a series of perfectly symmetrical V’s. “Oh, how neat! Tidy, I mean,” Delia said. “You’re very good at this.”

  “Part of a principal’s education,” Joel said. He wound the last of the bandage around her shin. Then he secured it with two metal clips the same shape as the butterfly closure on her temple. “How’s that?” he asked. He took hold of her foot, as if weighing it. “Tight enough?”

  “Oh, yes, it feels …”

  It felt wonderful. Not just the bandage—although the support was a great relief—but the hand clasping her foot, the large palm warming her arch through the elastic. She wished she could push even harder against his grip. She was thirsty, it seemed, for that firmness. Till now she had never realized that the instep could be an erogenous zone.