Back When We Were Grownups

by Anne Tyler

  By this time, Rebecca’s hair had dried into its usual pup-tent shape and her blouse had changed from an icy film to a warm, damp second skin beneath her blanket. She repositioned the blanket around her waist and accepted the loan of Zeb’s cardigan. Peter fared better: from the back seats and floors of various vehicles, an entire outfit was assembled. Emmy donated a sweatshirt, Danny a pair of striped baseball knickers, and Jeep two semi-white gym socks. Ignoring the curious stares of the other children, Peter stripped then and there, exposing tweaky pale dots of nipples and dingy, stretched-out underpants fraying at the edges. (This was what happened, Rebecca reflected, when a father had sole custody.) Everything was too big for him. Even Danny’s knickers—and Danny was barely thirteen—hung off him in folds, clinging to him only where the wet underpants had soaked through.

  It struck Rebecca as unusual that a boy that old didn’t mind changing clothes in public. And there was something needful and nudging about the way he stayed so close to his father. Once they were settled on NoNo’s blanket, he kept interrupting the conversation by plucking Barry’s sleeve and whispering at length in his ear, as if he were not just small for his age but young for his age, too.

  “Is that child all right?” she asked Zeb.

  “Oh, sure. Just bashful, I suspect,” he told her.

  But a big part of Zeb’s profession was soothing parents’ anxieties; so she turned to Biddy. “I haven’t heard him say a word to NoNo,” she said. “I hope there isn’t going to be some kind of stepmother problem.”

  Biddy said, “Well, at least he was playing with the other kids by the river. That’s always a good sign.”

  “He wouldn’t talk to us, though,” one of the children spoke up.

  This was Emmy, a long-legged sprite pouring lemonade from a thermos. Rebecca hadn’t realized she was listening. Hastily, she said, “Well, of course he wouldn’t talk! Imagine meeting all of you at once! I bet he talks your ears off as soon as he feels more at home.”

  “He wasn’t really playing, either. He was only, like, hanging around our edges.”

  Rebecca said, “Maybe I should give him a welcoming party. You know? The way I do for our new babies? I could, oh, set up a scavenger hunt! And all the clues could be Davitch-related, I mean things he would have to ask the other kids to—”

  “He would hate it,” Emmy said flatly.

  Rebecca slumped in her seat.

  Biddy was uncovering a tray of runny cheeses garnished with edible flowers, and a mosaic of tiny canapés studded with salmon roe, and a sunburst of snow peas filled with smoked trout and dill. Two days a week, Biddy worked as a nutritionist for a retirement community (her monthly newsletter, What Kind of Wine Goes with Oatmeal?, had been mentioned in the Baltimore Sun), but she dreamed of becoming a gourmet chef, and it showed. “Ew, what’s this?” the children were forever asking, pointing to something stuffed or sculptured or wonton-encased or otherwise disguised; and today they were all the more distressed because meaty, smoky smells had started drifting down the river from somebody else’s grill. “Can’t we ever have hamburgers?” Joey asked.

  Rebecca said, “You can get hamburgers any old place! It’s only at a Davitch party you can try these, um . . . these, um . . .”

  She was looking at a platter of pastry thimbles filled with what seemed to be mud. Biddy said, “Snails in phyllo cups.”

  Joey said, “Ew!”

  “I beg your pardon—” Biddy began, but then Rebecca grabbed Joey around the waist and pulled him close and nuzzled his neck. “Such a persnickety,” she teased him, “such a hoity-toity,” while he squirmed and giggled. He smelled of fresh sweat and sunshine. “Gram!” he protested, and she released him, and he went careening off toward his cousins.

  “That child needs to be taught some manners,” Biddy said. “Poppy? Care for a snail?” she asked her great-uncle.

  Poppy was seated on the other side of the picnic table, folding both hands on his cane and hunching forward all hungry and hopeful, but he drew back sharply and, “Oh,” he said, “why, ah, not just now, I don’t believe, thank you just the same.”

  Biddy sighed. “I don’t know why I bother,” she told Rebecca. “Why not just grill a batch of hot dogs, or set out a loaf of store-bought bread and a jar of peanut butter?”

  Why not, in fact? Rebecca wanted to ask. It wasn’t as if Biddy were catering to her own tastes, because Biddy didn’t eat. She was painfully, unattractively thin, every vertebra visible down the back of her neck, even her short black ponytail skimped and stringy, her wide-legged slacks and long red sweater all but empty. Offer her a bite and she’d say, “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly,” and yet she talked about food nonstop, read cookbooks the way other women read romance novels, pored over magazine photos featuring glossy, lacy salads and succulent pork roasts. “Call people to the table,” she told Rebecca now. “Everything’s drying out! Make them come!”—as if she herself could not be heard; as if the food were her only means of communication.

  Obediently, Rebecca stood up. (She knew from long experience that this family had to be corralled; a simple shout never worked.) “Children!” she called, wading through knee-high weeds. “Lunch is on!” Her shoes were squelching wetly, and her blanket started collecting a fuzz of burrs and pollen. “Lunch, Troy! Lunch, Hakim! Come eat, everybody!”

  She should wear a whistle around her neck for these occasions. She always threatened to do that, but then forgot until next time.

  Patch and Jeep seemed to be having an argument. Or Patch was arguing; Jeep was just kicking the ground with one huge, cloddish running shoe, his fists stuffed in his rear pockets and his eyes on the trees in the distance. “Lunch, you two!” Rebecca sang out. She scooped up the youngest grandchild but then was thrown off balance, and her blanket sarong hobbled her so that they both fell, laughing, into a clump of sprinkly white flowers. Rebecca’s daughter said, “Honestly, Mom!” and helped them to their feet.

  “Sorry,” Rebecca said, chastened.

  Once she had been the most serene and dignified young woman. That thought came to her, suddenly. She had worn her hair in a crown of braids, and friends had complimented her on the level way she carried her head, which had made her broad figure seem almost regal. Queen Rebecca, her roommate had called her.

  Well, that was all in the past now.

  By the time she got back to the picnic table, Poppy had started in on the least smelly of the cheeses. “Wait, Poppy!” she told him. “We haven’t drunk the toast yet!”

  “Who knows whether I’ll live that long?” he asked crossly, but he set down his knife. He was one of those old men who appear to curl up as they age, and his chin was practically resting on the table.

  Biddy was constructing a still life of exotic fruits—kiwis and mangoes and papayas and something that looked like green hand grenades. “How pretty!” Rebecca told her, although she was fairly certain that no one would venture to eat any. She reached past Biddy for a bottle of champagne and handed it to Barry. “Could you please open this?” she asked him. (Always give guests some useful task, if you want them to feel a part of things.) Another bottle went to Zeb, and she put Patch to work unpacking the old-fashioned, shallow sherbet glasses that the Davitches still used for champagne.

  “Why you bring real crystal to family picnics—” Patch began, but Rebecca said, “What better occasion, I ask you, than for my nearest and dearest?”

  “Half will be in splinters before we leave here; mark my words,” Patch told her.

  She was still upset about the engagement, Rebecca decided. It wasn’t like Patch to care if the stemware got broken. She wrapped an arm around Patch’s shoulders and whispered, “Sweetie, things will work out. We have to trust NoNo’s judgment! She must know what she’s doing.”

  Unfortunately, just at that moment Barry’s cell phone rang. He pulled it from a holster on his belt and said, “Hello?” Patch gave Rebecca a meaningful stare. Rebecca just smiled noncommittally and sat back down at the table.
/>   The children were complaining about their portions of champagne. They believed they should be given as much as the grownups, but what did they get? A tiny drop each, barely a swallow. “Once you’re legal drinking age—” Rebecca told them.

  “You always let Dixon have a full glass, and he’s not legal drinking age!”

  “Well, Dixon’s older than the rest of you, and besides, eighteen used to be legal.”

  Jeep didn’t like what he’d been served, either; he preferred beer. “Didn’t we bring a six-pack?” he asked. “Where’s that six-pack? Geez, Patch, you know how champagne makes me burp,” and he started rummaging through ice chests.

  Then Poppy took it into his head to start reciting his poem. “You’re given a special welcome when you get to heaven late,” he declaimed in a ringing voice.

  This was the poem he’d written for his wife’s funeral, all of thirty years ago, and he never missed a chance to quote it. As often as Rebecca had heard that opening line, she mistook it every time for a reference to the Davitches’ tendency toward tardiness. So like them to be unpunctual even in death! she always thought. Although the second line dispelled that notion. “When you’re the one who’s been left behind to mourn,” Poppy went on, rolling his r’s.

  “Yes, but, Poppy,” Rebecca said gently, and she reached across the table for his hand. “This is actually more of a joyous occasion, you know?”

  He glared at her, but he subsided. His hand had a light, hollow feel, like a dried-up locust shell, and it lay in hers without moving.

  Oh, none of the others considered how every engagement on earth would have to end up, Rebecca thought. They glided right over “till death do us part.”

  But she squared her shoulders, and, “So!” she cried. “Barry, NoNo, tell us how you met! This has all been such a surprise!”

  Barry was just replacing his phone in its holster. He looked over at NoNo, and she slipped both hands through the crook of his arm and smiled up at him. “Well,” she began, in her scratchy little voice, “you know how I’ve always had the gift of second sight.”

  Her sisters nodded, but a couple of the men were heard to groan.

  “Well, I’m standing in my shop one morning, and in walks Barry. Says he wants a dozen roses. ‘Fine,’ I say, and I turn to get them, and all at once, out of the corner of my eye, I see the strangest thing. I see me, standing next to him, and I’m wearing a white chiffon wedding dress and holding a bouquet of late-summer blooms in various shades of yellow and gold—calendulas and rudbeckia and cosmos and gerbera daisies.”

  Rebecca supposed it was only natural that NoNo should focus most specifically on the flowers, but even so, she couldn’t help laughing. The others looked at her. “Sorry,” she said.

  “And then,” NoNo went on, “I blink and he’s alone again. Waiting at the counter and wondering what the delay is, no doubt. So I go get the roses, I bring them out, I wrap them, and all the time I’m thinking madly. Madly. And finally I say, ‘What would you like me to put on the card?’ Which is not the usual thing, of course. Usually when a customer comes in person, he doesn’t bother with a card. Or if he does, he writes the message himself. But I was afraid he was married or something. I wanted to see who the roses were meant for.”

  “Only, I didn’t know that wasn’t the usual thing,” Barry said. “I told her, ‘Just write, For Mamie with love.’”

  “And I said, ‘Who is Mamie?’”

  Patch stopped handing out napkins. “You didn’t,” she said.

  “I did! I was brazen! And Barry said, ‘Mamie’s my secretary.’ See, it happened to be Professional Secretaries Day.”

  “You send flowers to your secretary with love?” Patch asked Barry.

  He shrugged. “It’s just an expression,” he said.

  Patch looked at him a moment longer and then went back to her napkins, shaking her head.

  But NoNo was oblivious. “In the meantime,” she told the others, “he is taking money from his wallet, and I am thinking, Shoot, he’s paying cash! I won’t find out his name! So I write on the card, For Mamie with love, from your boss and from Elinor Davitch, who would like to get to know him better.”

  Patch sent a despairing glance toward the sky.

  “Wasn’t that smart?” Barry asked, beaming down at NoNo. “She figured Mamie would ask me, ‘Who’s this Elinor Davitch?’ Which she did, sure enough. And I said, ‘Who is who?’ and Mamie showed me the card. I said, ‘Well, I never! It must be that woman at Budding Genius.’ And I went back there after work and asked if she’d have a drink with me.”

  “We hit it off immediately,” NoNo said. “I knew we would. Have I ever been wrong? Remember that time I saw a big, huge belly on Patch when she was trying to get pregnant? Remember when I asked Dixon why he was wearing a Johns Hopkins T-shirt? He said, ‘This is a Camp Fernwood T-shirt, Aunt NoNo, but I wish it were Johns Hopkins because Hopkins is my first-choice college.’ And I didn’t even know it! Nobody’d told me a thing!”

  Patch was shaking her head again. “Ridiculous,” she said in an undertone to Rebecca.

  Rebecca said, “Well, she does have this uncanny way of—”

  “Not that, Beck. Although how uncanny could it be, when she fulfilled her own prophecy by immediately writing that note, for Lord’s sake? But do you happen to have any idea when Secretaries Day is?”

  Rebecca said, “Um . . .”

  “It’s in April.”

  “April,” Rebecca said, still not comprehending.

  “That was barely two months ago! Or less; more like one month, because I think it’s toward the tail end of April. NoNo’s known this man just a month and now she’s up and marrying him!”

  Rebecca started to remind her that she wasn’t marrying him till August, after all. But in the lull that had suddenly fallen—with the only sounds the distant river and the chirring of the insects—she worried NoNo was overhearing their conversation. So instead, she picked up a glass of champagne. “Time for our toast, everybody!” she cried.

  One by one, they reached for glasses of their own. The children were the most enthusiastic. They raised theirs high above their heads, like people hailing taxicabs. The only exception was Peter, who sat on NoNo’s blanket in a puddle of heather-gray sweatshirt and allowed his glass to dangle limply from one hand.

  Rebecca drew in a deep breath and began:

  “A toast to the bunch of us gathered together

  In this glorious spring weather,

  And to Zeb for scoping out the site

  And Biddy for cooking with all her might.”

  Her rhyming toasts were a tradition. She had no illusions about their literary merit; she knew they were pure doggerel. (More than once, in a pinch, she’d been forced to rely on nonsense syllables—tra la la or tum dee diddle—to finish up a line.) But her family had come to expect them; so she took another breath and went on.

  “And most of all, to NoNo and Barry.

  We’re so delighted they’re planning to marry.”

  “Hear, hear,” the others murmured.

  Joey’s glass had a bee on the rim and there was a little to-do, since Joey was deathly allergic; but eventually they did all manage to take their sips. Then Barry said, “Well, thanks, you guys,” and sheepishly rubbed the top of his bristly blond crew cut.

  That was the best he could do?

  Oh, Rebecca always felt suspicious of the people that her loved ones fell in love with. She worried! She couldn’t help it! But that was her deep, dark secret, because invariably she was the first to rush forward with a warm welcome. Now she raised her glass again. “And next!” she said.

  “Next, a toast to Peter!

  Someone new in our family!

  Nothing could be sweeter.”

  “Hear, hear!” they repeated, more loudly now, and Barry said, “Aww,” and raised his glass to Rebecca. “That’s very nice of you,” he told her.

  But Peter said, “I’m not in your family.”

  His speaking v
oice turned out to be high and thin and childish, but it managed to silence everybody.

  “I’ve already got a family!” he said.

  Rebecca said, “I didn’t mean—I’m sorry! I honestly didn’t mean—”

  Peter scrambled to his feet, tossing aside his glass. (It sent out a spray of bright drops before it landed, intact, on the blanket.) His floppy borrowed socks nearly tripped him up, but he righted himself and started running.

  Not toward the river, thank goodness. He seemed headed for Barry’s car, although it was difficult to be sure. Rebecca, rising from her bench with her fingers pressed to her lips, thought he resembled one of those charred paper bits that float above a bonfire, gray and weightless, fluttering without aim. As he neared the car he glanced over his shoulder, and when he found Barry ambling behind at a nonchalant pace, he veered to the left without slowing down. In front of him was a green thicket. He plunged directly into it.

  “Stop him,” Zeb said suddenly.

  Everybody looked at him.

  “He’s going toward where the river bends! He’s headed for the water,” Zeb said, and he set off at a lope. “Barry!” he called. “Stop him! He’s about to get wet all over again!”

  Barry gathered speed.

  Peter entered the thicket and vanished.

  A moment later, Barry vanished too.

  And that is when the first intimation came to Rebecca from nowhere, brushing across her mind like the most delicate of moth wings.

  How on earth did I get like this? How? How did I ever become this person who’s not really me?

  Two