Back When We Were Grownups

by Anne Tyler

  “I couldn’t care less what color they are. Any color. Fine,” she said, and she hung up and returned to the table. “If I could undo one modern invention,” she told Poppy, “I believe it would be the telephone.”

  “Why, I would choose the zipper,” he said.

  Rebecca stared at him a moment, but before she could pursue the subject, the telephone rang again. Mrs. Allen had forgotten to mention that her husband didn’t eat red meat. Then a moment later, she called back: he didn’t eat chicken, either.

  “Why don’t you let that machine of yours pick up?” Poppy asked Rebecca.

  A reasonable enough question. She didn’t tell him that she kept thinking each call might be Will Allenby.

  The evening seemed to be the time for wrong numbers. Three different people phoned by mistake, one of them several times in succession—a Slavic-sounding woman who wanted to argue the issue. “Wrong number! No! This is not wrong number! I telephone my daughter! Bring her on!”

  At nine o’clock, Rebecca went off to bed with one of her Robert E. Lee books. It began with Lee’s genealogy, which she found dull. She made herself continue, though. The thought came to her (on a whole separate track in her brain, while the first track continued cataloguing Lee’s great-grandparents) that over the years, she had gradually given up reading anything difficult. Even a newspaper article, the briefest little piece: if the first line didn’t grab her, she turned the page. It was something like her attitude toward exercise. Whenever she grew the least bit tired or out of breath, she quit. “I figure my body’s trying to tell me something,” she would say jokingly to Patch. (For invariably, it was Patch who urged her into these fitness efforts.) “If it’s sending me such a clear message, how can I ignore it?”

  When Lee’s great-grandparents gave way to his grandparents, she put down her book and phoned Zeb. “What are you doing?” she asked when he answered.

  “I’m reading about the harmful effects of night-lights.”

  “Night-lights!”

  “Evidently, children who’ve been raised with night-lights in their rooms end up having vision problems. Their eyes don’t get enough rest, is the hypothesis.”

  “Or maybe,” Rebecca said, “the children didn’t see well to begin with, and there’s some biological connection between fear of the dark and bad eyesight; ever thought of that?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Maybe their bad eyesight caused their fear of the dark. The chair that looks like a monster, for instance.”

  “This subject appears to have really gripped your imagination,” Zeb told her.

  “Yes, well . . .”

  She glanced at her clock radio. It was almost 10 p.m. Anybody phoning this late would think, Who can she be talking to?

  She must be so popular! he would think.

  “I’ve been making some resolutions,” she told Zeb. “From now on, I’m reading two books a week, serious books that I have to work at. Also, I’m joining a gym. I plan to get into shape, for once.”

  “Now, what would you want to do that for? You’re fine the way you are.”

  “No, I’m not! I’m a slug. You of all people, a doctor . . . Or maybe I should take up jogging. That would be less expensive. Except jogging’s affected by weather. Half the time the weather would be too hot, or it would be raining. I would feel so conspicuous, jogging with an umbrella.”

  “Rebecca. Joggers don’t carry umbrellas.”

  “How do they stay dry, then?” she asked him. But she was just being silly now, trying to get him to laugh.

  After they said goodbye, she instantly sobered. The torn feeling seemed to have grown more pronounced, spreading its ragged edges deep inside her. She sat upright against her pillows and fixed her gaze on the phone. But no one else called.

  * * *

  The time that was finally settled on for the baby-welcoming was Labor Day. Another picnic lunch on the North Fork River, was the plan, except that Hurricane Dennis moved through the area over the weekend and they changed it to an indoor event.

  The general theme turned out to be medical emergencies. First Joey was stung by a bee that had somehow found its way into the front parlor, and he had to be rushed off for a shot because he was allergic. Min Foo and Hakim, of course, were the ones who took him, along with the guest of honor since Min Foo was breast-feeding. This made the whole occasion sort of pointless. (Although still the Open Arms was a seething mass of Davitches, quarreling and laughing and shouting above the racket, children chasing each other around the dining-room table, Biddy pressing food on people, Troy and Jeep exchanging hair-raising childbirth stories.) Then Patch’s youngest two got into some kind of shoving match—not a very serious one, but Merrie bruised her crazy bone and had to be carried off, howling, to the kitchen for ice. “It wasn’t my fault,” Danny said. “She’s the one who was acting so damn piggish.”

  Rebecca tried to grow taller. “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  Danny, raising his voice, said, “It wasn’t my fault; she’s the one who was acting so damn piggish!”

  Rebecca briefly closed her eyes. She opened them to find Poppy standing in front of her, swaying slightly. “Beck,” he said, “I don’t feel so good.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve got this pain.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Here,” he said, and he clutched a handful of his shirtfront.

  His face, she saw now, was a grayish white. All his features seemed to have sharpened. “Sit down,” she told him. “Zeb? Where’s Zeb? Somebody get Zeb! Hurry!”

  She was leading Poppy toward the sofa as she spoke, half supporting him, noticing how alarmingly lightweight he was. She thought that he was trembling; then she thought it might be she who was trembling. He, in fact, seemed curiously calm, and made a point of positioning his cane just so along the inside edge of the sofa before he lay down. He laced his fingers across his diaphragm and closed his eyes. Rebecca said, “Zeb?”

  “Zeb went with Joey and them,” a child offered.

  “He did?”

  “In case Joey needed first aid on the way.”

  “Call an ambulance,” Rebecca ordered. “Poppy? Is the pain, let’s see, radiating down your left arm?”

  He thought it over. “It could be,” he said.

  “Somebody call an ambulance!”

  Then there was the question of who would go along. Half a dozen people offered, including Danny, who wanted to see what an ambulance ride was like, and Alice Farmer, who felt that Poppy needed her prayers. “Beck would be enough,” Poppy said with his eyes still closed. “I don’t believe I care for a lot of clucking and wailing.” His lids were like bits of waxed paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out.

  Rebecca rushed off for her purse and Poppy’s Medicare card. His room, with its smell of cough drops and stale clothing, the bedspread drawn clumsily over the pillow, seemed emptier than was natural. She snatched his billfold from the bureau and hurried downstairs.

  Two ambulance men were already loading Poppy onto a stretcher. They had arrived without sirens, or maybe she just hadn’t heard them over the hubbub. (Everyone seemed to be issuing orders, and a couple of children were crying.) “What’s the matter with him?” she asked the men. “Is he going to be all right?” They brushed past her with the stretcher and she trotted close behind, clasping Poppy’s frail ankle beneath the blanket until they reached the front door and she had to let go. Luckily it wasn’t raining at the moment, although the sidewalks were wet and everyone had to step carefully.

  Inside the ambulance, which was crammed with a reassuring array of dials and gauges and stainless steel machinery, Rebecca sat on a little seat beside the stretcher and took hold of Poppy’s ankle again—the only part of him not hooked up to wires in some way. This time they turned on the sirens. The driver spoke into a sort of intercom while he drove, relaying Poppy’s name, age, and Social Security number as Rebecca supplied them, and the other man monitored Poppy. “Is this
a heart attack?” Rebecca asked, and the man said, “Too soon to tell.”

  Poppy said, “But I haven’t had my hundredth-birthday party yet!”

  “Oh, Poppy,” she said. “You’ll have your party! I promise.”

  She felt close to tears, which surprised her, because hadn’t she always chafed at Poppy’s presence in her life, and resented how she’d had no choice in the matter, and even, on occasion, allowed herself to fantasize his death? But apparently you grow to love whom you’re handed. It seemed shocking—a scandal, an atrocity—that such a thin, gray, warm-ankled person might just stop being, as easily as that.

  Poppy glared at the ceiling and chewed his mustache.

  Once they’d reached the hospital, Rebecca was directed to a desk to answer questions while the ambulance men wheeled Poppy through a set of swinging doors. “I’ve already answered everything!” she told a nurse. (Was she a nurse? Hard to know, nowadays, with these teddy-bear-print smocks and baggy pants.) The woman patted her arm and said, “You can see your loved one in just a few minutes.”

  Rebecca didn’t like the sound of that loved one.

  She answered the questions all over again, signed several forms, and then chose a chair as far as possible from anybody else. The room had the scrappy, exhausted look of a place where people had sat too long and then left in too much of a hurry. Empty Styrofoam cups—one of them scalloped with bite marks around the rim—dotted the tables; the magazines had been read into ruffles; a blue-jeaned man lay sleeping on an orange vinyl couch patched here and there with duct tape. Near the window, a family argued about who should go back home and walk the dog. A woman spoke urgently into a pay phone. Another woman tore something from a magazine inch by inch, trying to make no sound, while her husband yawned aloud and stretched his legs out until he was nearly diagonal in his seat.

  Just yesterday Rebecca had snapped Poppy’s head off. He’d been complaining about his exercises—“Why you make me go through these boring, baby arm bends every morning . . .” he’d said—and she had said, “Fine, then; quit doing them. See if I care when your elbows rust solid.” And last week she had refused to take him to visit his friend, Mr. Ames. Worse than refused: she had said she would but kept putting it off, hoping Poppy would forget, and eventually he had stopped asking her, perhaps because he forgot but perhaps because he had simply lost hope. It broke her heart, now, to think of that.

  She watched a skeletal man on crutches shuffle through the room, guided by some kind of aide—a round-faced young girl who kept an arm around his waist. He was speaking to her in a peevish drone: “They shoot you with their needles, wrench you every which way, make you stay perfectly still for hours on end . . . Then they force you to drink all these gallons of water after. Say, ‘With our patients who get a dye, we like to encourage the fluids.’ Which gave me quite a start, seeing as how what I heard was, ‘With our patients who’re going to die . . .’”

  The girl laughed softly and squeezed his waist with such apparent affection that Rebecca wondered for a moment whether she was a relative. But no: more likely just one of those low-level, underpaid hospital employees who showed more genuine care than many physicians. She was opening a door now and shepherding him through it, one hand placed gently at the small of his back.

  This was where they’d brought Patch when her appendix burst. Although the place had been remodeled since then, perhaps more than once. And NoNo when she broke her wrist. Or maybe not; that might have been Union Memorial. Oh, all those accidents, childhood illnesses, frantic late-night rides . . . Rebecca ought to publish a rating chart for Baltimore emergency rooms.

  Joe had been taken here, too, but they’d moved him to Intensive Care before she arrived. She had spent four days and three nights in the Intensive Care waiting room—a much smaller space, with its own uniquely dread-filled atmosphere. Once an hour she had been allowed to come in and grip Joe’s unresponsive hand for five minutes before they made her leave again. Upon her return to the waiting room, total strangers would ask, “Did he speak to you? Did he open his eyes?” and she would ask the same of them when they returned from their relatives. They had grown as close as family through fear and grief and endless hours of just sitting. Although now, she couldn’t recall what those people had looked like, even.

  A woman dressed in aqua scrubs called, “Mrs. Davitch? Is there a Mrs. Davitch?”

  “Here I am,” she said, standing up.

  “You can come on back now.”

  Rebecca collected her purse and followed the woman through the swinging doors, down a linoleum-floored corridor. “How is he?” she asked, but the woman said, “Doing just fine!” so promptly that Rebecca suspected she had no idea. They entered a large, uncannily quiet area where doctors were going about their business without any appearance of haste, thoughtfully studying clipboards or conferring at a central desk. Curtained cubicles lined three walls, and the woman slid one curtain back to expose Poppy’s yellow-soled feet poking forth from his stretcher. “Company!” she sang out, and then she left, her jogging shoes squeaking as she turned to close the curtain behind her.

  Rebecca walked around to Poppy’s head and found him wide awake, scowling at the machine that chirped and blinked beside him. “How’re you feeling?” she asked him.

  “How do you expect I’d feel? With all this commotion going on.”

  “Is the chest pain any better?”

  “Some.”

  “What have they done so far?”

  “Punctured about six veins for blood. Gave me an EKG. Went off and left me lying here in the very worst position for somebody subject to backache.”

  He was wearing a pastel hospital gown that made him look frivolous and pathetic. An IV needle was attached to the back of one hand. She covered the other hand with her own, and he allowed it. He closed his eyes and said, “It’s okay with me if you stay.”

  “I’ll be right here,” she told him.

  She kept her hand on top of his, shifting her weight from time to time when her legs started to tire. There was a chair over near the curtain, but she didn’t want to risk disturbing him.

  If this turned out to be Poppy’s deathbed, heaven forbid, how strange that she should be standing beside it! Ninety-nine years ago, when he had come into the world, nobody could have foreseen that an overweight college dropout from Church Valley, Virginia—not even a Davitch, strictly speaking—would be the one to hold his hand as he left it.

  Well, that was the case with nearly everybody, she supposed. Lord only knew who would be attending her deathbed.

  The curtain rattled back, and all at once, there was Zeb—a comfort to behold, with his long, kind, homely face and smudged glasses. “How’re you doing?” he asked her.

  “Well, I’m fine, but Poppy, here . . .”

  Poppy opened his eyes and said, “I believe they’re trying to finish me off.”

  “Nope. They’re letting you go,” Zeb told him. He was peering now at the chirpy machine. “Turns out it’s indigestion.”

  “It is?”

  “I just spoke with the resident.”

  “Oh! Indigestion!” Rebecca cried. It was such a wonderful word, she felt the need to say it herself.

  “I hear you had three cupcakes at the baby-welcoming,” Zeb told Poppy.

  “Well, what if I did? I’ve eaten far more, many a time.”

  “They’re going to bring you an antacid. That should help,” Zeb said. “It may take a while to spring you, hospitals being what they are, but sooner or later, we’ll get you out.” He looked over at Rebecca and said, “We should let them know at home. They’re pretty worried.”

  “Did Joey get his shot?”

  “He did, and he’s back at the party making up for lost time.”

  “I’ll go telephone,” she said. She bent to kiss Poppy’s cheek and told him, “I’m glad it wasn’t serious.”

  “Well, I don’t know what the world is coming to,” Poppy said, “if a man can’t eat three measly cupcakes wit
hout folks calling an ambulance.”

  She patted his shoulder and walked out, feeling lighter than air.

  During the period she’d spent with Poppy, the waiting room had acquired a whole different population. The blue-jeaned man had vanished from the couch. A boy in a yellow raincoat sat slumped in front of the TV. An elderly woman stared into space and bit her lip. Rebecca felt a distant, detached pity. When she dropped her coins in the pay phone and called home, she tried to keep her voice low so that none of them would hear what a lucky person she was.

  * * *

  By the time they got back to the Open Arms, it was evening and all the guests had gone home except for Biddy. She was tidying up in the kitchen. “Have some green-tea soufflé,” she told them. “There’s a ton of it left over, because none of the others would eat it. I shouldn’t have let on what kind it was. ‘Green tea!’ they said. ‘What’s wrong with chocolate?’ Oh, you had a phone call, Beck. Somebody named Will Allenby.”

  Rebecca froze.

  “’Green tea is for drinking,’ they said, and I said, ‘Listen.’ I said, ‘If you-all were not so prejudiced—‘”

  “What did he want?” Rebecca asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “What did Will Allenby want?”

  “Just for you to call him back, I think. He said you would know his number. How are you feeling, Poppy? Are you still having chest pains?”

  “Pains? Oh, pains,” Poppy said. He was dishing out the soufflé, piling it into a bowl he had taken from the cabinet. “I don’t know why everybody had to get so excited,” he said. “I told them all along, I said—”

  “I guess I’ll be going to bed now,” Rebecca broke in.

  Everyone looked at her.

  “Good night,” she said, and she walked out, leaving a startled silence behind her.

  She climbed the stairs, went straight to her room, and sat on the edge of her bed. Felt for the little stick of paper under her telephone. Held it up to the soft yellow light shining in from the hall.