Back When We Were Grownups

by Anne Tyler

  Will said, “Pardon?”

  Didn’t he seem so young, all at once! So loosely constructed, and narrow through the jaw! So half-baked, really.

  “Rebecca?” he asked. “Is something the matter?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m just tired, I guess.”

  It occurred to her that she led an absolutely motionless existence. There was nothing to look forward to in it. Nothing whatsoever.

  * * *

  Monday evening, as usual, they met in the library to study. Rebecca arrived first, and a few minutes later Will sat down at her table and opened his leather briefcase. Shuffle, shuffle, his notes emerged, and two textbooks arrived with a thud, followed by a loose-leaf binder, followed by a great array of pens and pencils. His red ballpoint for editing, black fountain pen for composing, lead pencil for notes in borrowed books, and blue ballpoint for the books that he owned. Each one he aligned precisely with the others at the head of his place. Watching made Rebecca feel itchy.

  He opened his loose-leaf binder and smoothed a page that was already smooth.

  On April 19, 1861, Rebecca forced herself to read, troops were ordered transferred from . . .

  Something made her glance toward the library door—a flash of movement. She looked through the center windowpane and found Joe Davitch’s laughing eyes. She scraped her chair back. Will set an index finger on his page and raised his head. “Goodbye, Will,” she told him.

  “Huh?” he asked. “You’re leaving? So soon? I still have work to do!”

  “That’s all right; stay where you are.”

  “Oh. Well. Okay. So, um . . . au revoir, I guess.”

  “No,” she said. “Goodbye.”

  And then she walked out the door and into Joe Davitch’s arms.

  * * *

  Or that was how she described it to her grandchildren, years later.

  Gliding over the complications: the second, third, and fourth goodbye scenes that Will thickheadedly seemed to require; the loose ends left behind at school with exams not taken, spring semester incomplete; the general dismay when she moved, bag and baggage, to the Open Arms’ third floor two weeks before the wedding. “Oh, I know this person must be very attractive,” her mother said on the phone. “Very handsome and good-looking; I can just imagine. Probably has no end of charm. But I have to ask you this, Rebecca: do you realize what you’re getting into? We’re talking about the man who’ll be holding your hand when you die. Or you’ll be holding his hand when he dies. Is that something you have considered?”

  “Die?” Rebecca said.

  “No, I thought not,” her mother said grimly.

  Then at another point—at several other points: “And what about poor Will? What about his mother? How on earth will I ever face Maud Allenby again?”

  She probably hadn’t faced Maud Allenby again, Rebecca thought now. She probably crossed the street to avoid her, even after all these years. She turned from an aspirin commercial to ask, “Do you ever see Mrs. Allenby?”

  “She passed away,” her mother said, not taking her eyes from the screen. “I thought I told you.”

  Rebecca said, “Oh!” She did seem to recollect that she had heard that.

  “But we’d stopped keeping company long before,” her mother said. “It just never was the same after you jilted Will.”

  “Well, I’m sure he managed to survive it,” Rebecca told her.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I wouldn’t have any idea. I don’t know where he settled, what he’s doing, whether he ever remarried . . .”

  Rebecca waited for her mother to correct herself, but she didn’t; so finally she said, “He couldn’t remarry; he wasn’t married in the first place.”

  “The fact of the matter is,” her mother said, “Will Allenby was your true soul’s companion. I still believe that. The two of you had so much in common; you were so much in love; you understood each other so well. Maud and I talked about it often. ‘Aren’t they compatible?’ I used to say. ‘It’s just as if they knew each other from some previous incarnation. They’re both such old, wise souls,’ I said. ‘They belong together, those two.’”

  Rebecca turned to look at her.

  “You became a whole different person after you jilted Will,” her mother said.

  * * *

  Rebecca’s girlhood room still had the same furniture—a twin bed with a white-and-gilt “French provincial” headboard, a low bureau with an attached oval mirror, and a nightstand topped with a doily. But all personal traces of her had vanished long ago, and when she walked in with her overnight bag she could just as well have been entering a hotel room. It didn’t even smell like her anymore. Not that she was certain what her own smell was; but this smell was her mother’s, clean but musty, unused.

  What kept her mother going, these days? Her life seemed so stagnant: the tea-and-toast breakfast, the few dishes washed and dried afterward, the bedclothes pulled up, the carpet sweeper rolled across an already immaculate carpet . . .

  Well, what kept anyone going? Who was Rebecca to talk?

  The telephone rang—the turquoise Princess phone with a rotary dial that still sat on the nightstand—and a moment later she heard a tapping on her door. “Rebecca?” her mother called. “It’s Joe’s brother.”

  “Oh, thanks,” she said, and she picked up the receiver.

  She assumed it was something routine until she heard the thin blade of distress in his voice. “I’m sorry as hell to bother you—” he started right in.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The basement: it’s filling with water. But there hasn’t been a drop of rain; I don’t know what—”

  “Which part of the basement?”

  “The part over by the window.”

  “Darn,” she said. “It’s the main drain again.”

  “What does that mean? What should I do?”

  “Are you upstairs?” she asked him.

  “Yes, I’m in the family room. I don’t know what happened! I went down to put my laundry in the dryer; I’d done a little wash earlier. And all at once I was walking in water. There was this horrible sloshing sound! It was like something in a nightmare!”

  Rebecca tried not to let her amusement show in her voice. “Now, Zeb,” she said, “this is not all that much of a problem. It’s the tree next door’s roots clogging up the drain line, that’s all. Mr. Burdick will have it fixed in no time.”

  “This late at night?”

  “No, we’ll have to wait till morning. But you should call him now to let him know we need him. Go over to my desk, get my little leather address book—”

  “What if the water keeps rising?”

  “It won’t. Just don’t turn on any more faucets than you can help, and try not to flush any toilets. I’ll start out extra early tomorrow so I can be there when Mr. Burdick arrives.”

  “I’m awfully sorry, Rebecca. I wanted you to have a worry-free visit.”

  “I am worry-free,” she said. “And you should be, too. This is not a serious problem. Just call Mr. Burdick—John Burdick & Sons.”

  “Well,” Zeb said. “All right.”

  She could tell he was reassured. His voice had returned to its usual level rumble.

  “How’s Poppy doing?” she asked him.

  “He’s okay. He’s gone to bed. He asked me twice what time you were coming home.”

  “Tell him, oh, say, nine a.m. And tell Mr. Burdick, too. I don’t want him getting there before me.”

  “Okay, Rebecca. Thanks.”

  “Good night, Zeb.”

  She hung up and reached for the alarm clock, an old Baby Ben that had been allowed to run down. First she wound it, and then she set the alarm for 6:00.

  Any time now, she was convinced, that house was going to end up a heap of rubble. Only she knew all its hidden ailments. She remembered the day she’d moved in—the shock of the upstairs with its fake-wood-grain metal bedsteads and rickety pressboard bookshelves. The casual guest would never suspect how the windo
ws stuck, and the faucets dripped, and the walls appeared to be suffering from some sort of skin disease. From a distance, the place looked so imposing.

  If her very first meeting with Joe had foretold her role in his life forever after, she thought as she undressed, hadn’t it also foretold her role in the Open Arms? For it seemed the place was always beset by disasters, both physical and social, and Rebecca was always, by default, coming to the rescue. Not that she’d had any aptitude for it. She wasn’t much of a cook; she couldn’t hammer a nail straight; she’d been a wallflower from birth. But gradually, she had learned. She’d become more take-charge, almost bossy. “Have you grown taller?” her mother asked on one of her rare visits. “There’s something different.” Rebecca hadn’t grown an inch, but she agreed there was something different. She felt she took up more space. Her voice sounded louder now, even to her, and her laugh had acquired a ha-ha sound while before, it had been mere breath.

  Standing naked in this room where she had spent her childhood, slipping her nightgown over her head and letting it fall to her ankles, she thought how her past self would have gasped at the sight of her. The old Rebecca would never have known the woman she saw in the mirror, with the hair like a heap of cornflakes and the ramshackle face. She would have been put off by the slipshod, heedless way this woman strode toward her bed.

  She folded the spread back and whacked it flat.

  Surprisingly, she had no trouble getting to sleep. She turned once, tossed aside her blanket, turned again, and Poppy was celebrating his birthday. The Open Arms was packed with guests, all the women in hoopskirts and the men in Confederate gray. But Rebecca had on the chambray smock spotted with bleach that she wore for heavy cleaning. She glanced down at herself and, “Oh, fiddle!” she said, in a flirty Southern voice like Scarlett O’Hara’s. Then she saw that one of the guests was Will Allenby. He walked over to her, smiling, holding his hat in his hand. He wasn’t one day older than the very last time she had seen him: twenty. His chest was paved with medals and his riding pants stretched taut over his long thighs.

  She opened her eyes in the dark and felt a deep ache of regret.

  Four

  Now she began to lead a whole other life—an imaginary, might-have-been life flowing almost constantly underneath the surface of her day-to-day existence.

  If she had not attended Amy’s engagement party that long-ago evening, if Zeb had not made her laugh so that she seemed, for one brief moment, to be a joyous and outgoing person, if Joe Davitch had not walked up to her and said, “I see you’re having a wonderful time,” why, no doubt she would have stayed on in college.

  Graduated with honors.

  Married Will Allenby.

  Dear Will Allenby, with his airy yellow curls and serene, contemplative smile, his nearly transparent eyes that seemed lit from within. She was startled to discover him complete and detailed in her mind, as if all these years he had been poised to step forward the very first instant she recollected his existence. He used to have a habit of raking his fingers through his hair whenever he was caught up in some intellectual discussion, and now she could see so clearly those agile, knuckly fingers (like the fingers of the son in her dream!) and the electric look of his hair. She recalled how he had loved listening to Bach, hated girls who giggled, and claimed an almost physical allergy to the color red.

  Peculiar memories popped up out of nowhere: a high-school assembly, for instance, where the World’s Fastest Typist had given a demonstration. Plump and bald and expressionless, he had sat behind a tiny metal stenographic desk, facing his audience but gazing over their heads while his typewriter, seemingly of its own accord, chattered away without pause and spat sheets of paper onto the floor. Will had muttered under his breath during the whole performance. What did this prove? he kept asking Rebecca. The man’s assistant—a leggy blonde dressed in what appeared to be a carhop’s uniform—scooped up each page and proclaimed it to be perfect, one hundred percent accurate, x many words per minute; but why should they believe her? From this distance, the pages could be blank. Rebecca had tried to hush him, but Will had persisted. “This is outrageous!” he had said in a piercing whisper. “They’re wasting our valuable learning time!” She had grown annoyed with him; she had moved her arm away from where it was touching his. Now she liked remembering that. Cataloguing his flaws brought him back to her more convincingly. She dwelt upon his overlarge teeth, which she used to feel pressing knobbily behind his lips when they kissed; the puppy-dog clumsiness of his hugs; and the affectation (as she saw it now) of his “Au revoir” at the end of every evening.

  It was true they had never slept together, but they’d talked about it endlessly. Why it was better to wait; how maybe it was silly to wait; what were the pros and cons. Will had a book called Married Love that he’d ordered from the back of a magazine. He had perused it from cover to cover and studied all the diagrams—the fallopian tubes like orchid stems and the Missionary Position. He read aloud from it to Rebecca and she listened with what she hoped was an expression of mild interest, her head slightly tilted and her eyes on a point in midair. (Although inwardly, of course, she was riveted by every word, and found it almost beyond belief that the married couples of her acquaintance could spend hours together engaged in any other activity.) Oh, she and Joe had had a very happy sex life, but now she was sorry she had missed the experience of figuring it all out with someone equally unskilled. Will would have been so scientific about it! So focused, so comically intense!

  She used to write Will Allenby on her notebooks, and W.A.+ R.H. And, in very small, secretive letters, Rebecca Allenby. It had bothered her that a voice break was required between those two adjacent a’s. Rebecca Holmes Allenby, she had amended. Mrs. Willard Allenby.

  She supposed that they would have married immediately after college. That was one of the steps in their life plan. They would have moved to some larger and more prestigious university where the two of them could pursue their Ph.D.’s—Will’s in physics, Rebecca’s in American history. She could visualize their apartment as concretely as if that, too, were a memory: a comfortably shabby flat in some faculty widow’s house just off campus, with brick-and-board bookcases, Chianti-bottle candlesticks, and a batik bedspread. Their meals would be very simple—bread and soup, say, on a cleared space among the books on the kitchen table. And every night after supper they would take a walk, just the two of them, hand in hand, learnedly discussing their respective research projects. The town they walked through seemed to be Baltimore and yet not Baltimore, the way places are in dreams. It was cleaner and more organized, and it smelled of fresh-grated nutmeg as Baltimore used to do before the spice factory moved to the suburbs. Also, there was no traffic. The only sound was the tapping of their shoes on the empty sidewalk.

  Her true real life, was how she thought of this scenario. As opposed to her fake real life, with its tumult of drop-in relatives and party guests and repairmen. Gradually, she sank so deeply into her true real life that she grew remote and strange, and it took her minutes, sometimes, to pull herself together when she was asked a question. But nobody seemed to notice.

  * * *

  At the moment, her fake real life revolved around NoNo’s wedding. This was set for the twelfth of August—a Thursday, so as not to interfere with any paying events. NoNo kept insisting that it shouldn’t be a big deal, but even so there was the guest list to be seen to, the arrangements to be made for Barry’s family, the food to be discussed with Biddy. If Rebecca had had her way they would have scheduled a rehearsal, too, but so far the couple hadn’t even found a minister. (Neither of them belonged to any kind of church.) “Never mind,” NoNo kept saying, “I’m sure it will all work out”—an assumption that seemed foolhardy when you considered she had grown up in the Open Arms. And then she announced, out of the blue, that all she really cared about was the garden. “The what?” Rebecca asked.

  “The garden. Did I mention that I wanted an outdoor wedding?”

  Rebecca’s jaw dr
opped.

  For starters, they didn’t have a garden. They had a scratchy little three-foot plot of rosebushes at the front of the house, for show, and a slightly larger plot of mostly weeds at the back of the house that ended where the kitchen building began. And since it was the hottest and driest summer in living memory, the weeds were not even green. They were a parched and frizzled beige, and the azaleas under the dining-room window had turned into dead brown twigs. Besides which, who in her right mind would want an outdoor wedding when the average heat index was a hundred and five degrees?

  But NoNo said, “I am a florist, after all,” as if that explained everything.

  “Well, then,” Rebecca said, “maybe, as a florist, you can tell me how to get a halfway decent garden inside of two weeks.”

  “Don’t you have that lawn-mowing boy? Rock, or Stone, or whoever?”

  “Brick,” Rebecca said. “He hasn’t been here since early July. There’s nothing for him to mow.”

  “I’m sure he can think of something. Lay down sod, bring in a few container plants . . .”

  Rebecca had always considered NoNo to be the easiest, the most compliant and obliging of the four Davitch girls. But now she wasn’t so certain.

  And then came the food issue. All at once, NoNo decided she didn’t want Biddy to cater. This was after Biddy had planned out her menu and lined up a non-family wait staff. NoNo said she would hate to make Biddy work on her sister’s wedding day. Biddy said, “I’d work before the day. That was going to be my gift to you and Barry. I wouldn’t have to lift a finger during the actual wedding. I would show up in a dressy dress and behave like a regular guest.”

  “I was thinking about the people who catered that shower last weekend,” NoNo said in a musing tone. “The Guilty Party, their name was. I have a copy of their menu.”

  Biddy looked over at Rebecca. She said, “You just so happen to have a copy of their menu.”

  “They do such nice, straightforward, uncomplicated food,” NoNo said.