by Anne Tyler
She spun away to unwrap the platter of cold chicken on the counter. Will followed at her heels, his hands jammed awkwardly in his rear pockets. He said, “It’s true you always wanted ten children.”
“Who, me?”
“You said that being an only child was so, what did you say, so pitiful. You wanted a big, jolly crew of children.”
“I did?”
She stopped to stare at him, with a serving fork poised over the chicken.
“And you would have all these traditions, you said—all these family rituals, those big Christmases and Thanksgivings that other families had.”
She said, “I don’t remember that.”
“Well, it seems you ended up with it, anyhow.”
“I don’t remember a bit of that,” she told him. “Could you bring in the bread basket, please?”
He picked the basket up and followed her back to the dining room. “Pretty,” he said of the table.
She flushed. She thought now she might have overdone things. “Oh,” she said, setting down the platter, “it’s no big deal. You can sit facing the window. I’ll go get the salad.”
But when she returned, he was still standing. He waited till she had lit the candles, and then he pulled out her chair for her. His hand on her chair was so close that she could feel its warmth through the fabric of her blouse. In a sudden fit of daring, she leaned back imperceptibly until her shoulder was pressing against his fingers. But he drew away as if he hadn’t noticed and went around to his side of the table.
Or maybe he had noticed, and was deliberately rebuffing her.
“What’s happening in your backyard?” he asked as he sat down.
“My . . . ?” She twisted around to look through the open window behind her. “Oh, those are the nurserymen. They’re putting in some azaleas.”
He said, “This is like running a plantation or something. Do you employ a large staff?”
“No, just . . . well, a woman who helps with the cleanup, sometimes, if it’s a big party.” She passed him the chicken.
“And what is your role at these parties? You provide the entertainment? Magicians for children’s birthdays and such?”
“No, it’s really just the physical space. Although we do offer catering, if the customer wants it.”
She hated how chatty and informative she sounded, like someone delivering an advertising spiel. Was this all they could find to talk about? They seemed to do much better on the telephone than in person.
She forked a drumstick onto her plate. “I was wondering,” she said. (Preplanned topic number two.) “Is your daughter like you were at her age?”
“No,” Will said. “She’s bewildering.”
Rebecca laughed, but he gazed back at her glumly. He said, “I never have understood the first thing about her. I didn’t understand her when she was a baby and I understand her even less now that she’s an adolescent.”
“Oh, well, adolescents,” Rebecca said, waving a hand. “Who does understand them?” She helped herself to a roll.
“Laura seems to. Her mother.”
“Really?”
She waited to hear more, but the person who spoke next was one of the workers in the backyard. “Now, this here is my advice,” he said. His words were punctuated by the chuffing sound of a pickax. “Never, ever agree to stay overnight at a woman’s place. No matter how she begs and pleads, you have her stay at your place, or else a motel or a buddy’s place. Because you really got no way of knowing when her boyfriend might get out of jail. This one gal, she says her boyfriend couldn’t never in a million years get out, and like a fool I believe her. I say okay, I’ll sleep over, and what do you think happens? Next morning there’s a knock on the door. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Who can that be?’ Steps up naked as a jaybird to look through the little peephole and then comes squawking back to me, ‘Lord Almighty, it’s him!’ I says, ‘Woman?’ I says, ‘Woman, didn’t you swear and declare that he was locked up good?’”
Will said, “Of course, Laura’s considerably younger than I am. I suppose it’s only natural she would have a better understanding of adolescents.”
Rebecca refocused her thoughts. “How much younger?” she asked.
“She’s thirty-eight; I’m fifty-three.”
“So, let’s see . . . fifteen years. Well, with Joe and me it was almost that much: thirteen and a half.”
Outside the window, the nurseryman was saying, “I walk past him in the hall; say, ‘How you doing,’ and keep on going. ‘How you doing,’ he says back, and I walk on down the stairs just easy-like and careless-like, but all the time the back of my neck is tingling; know how it will do? Waiting for that knife between the shoulder blades.”
“Man, you was lucky,” another voice said. “How come you to put any stock in what a woman tells you?”
“This chicken is delicious,” Will said.
Rebecca said, “Thank you. Won’t you have some salad?”
“Thanks.”
“The thing about women is, they want what they want when they wants it,” the first man said. “They don’t mind what they might have to do to get it. They’ll do anything. They won’t be stopped. They call you on the phone, and they come by your place of work, and they look you up at the house and try to mess with you. You tell them, ‘Gal, hey, cut me some slack,’ but they just, man, they just steamroll on and can’t nothing turn them aside.”
“But you were so mature for your age,” Will was saying.
Rebecca said, “Excuse me?”
“You were so serious. So involved in your studies. Laura, on the other hand . . .” He shrugged. He was stirring his salad around rather than eating it, she saw. (This was a recipe of Biddy’s, involving charred yellow beets. It might have been too gourmet.) “Well, I should have known,” he said. “The way we met: she enrolled in my introductory physics class but decided it wasn’t relevant to her life. She came to get permission to drop the course and I persuaded her not to. That was our first conversation.”
“Aha! See there?” Rebecca crowed, pointing her fork at him. Then she glanced toward the window and lowered her voice. “You’re bearing out my theory about prophetic moments.”
“Pathetic?” Will asked.
“Prophetic. Moments that predict a couple’s future. See: at the very start of your courtship, she was threatening to leave you.”
“But I thought it was just a normal student interview. I had no idea that that was the start of our courtship.”
“No, of course not. That’s how prophetic moments work,” Rebecca told him. “You don’t suspect that’s what they are at the time they’re taking place.”
“It does seem I should have heard some kind of alarm going off,” Will said. “This was the course I was always so proud of, the one where I showed beginning students that physics could be an adventure.”
Rebecca said, “Oh, what a shame.”
“And she never did really take to the subject,” Will said sadly. “She stayed on after I convinced her but dropped the course second semester; switched to ecology instead to finish up her science requirement. Ecology! A pretend sort of science. But all I thought at the time was, now I could ask her out. I must have been blind as a bat.”
“She must have been blind, to think physics was irrelevant,” Rebecca said.
“Well, that’s where the two of you differ,” Will told her. “Laura’s a more superficial type of person. What matters most to her are material things. Clothing, makeup, hairstyles, jewelry . . . On every possible occasion, including Easter, she expected me to give her a gift of jewelry.”
“Really!” Rebecca said. This was getting interesting. “What kind of jewelry?”
“Oh . . . I don’t know.”
“I mean, important jewelry, like diamonds? Or just a new charm for her bracelet or something.”
He stopped stirring his salad and looked at her.
“Well,” she said hastily, “some women are like that, I guess.”
“She
owned so many shoes that a closet company had to come build a special rack in her closet.”
“Gracious!”
Rebecca owned a lot of shoes herself. Not that she was a spendthrift. These were very cheap shoes, purchased on sale or at discount stores. But they seemed to have a way of not fitting quite right a short while after she bought them, and so she was always buying more. Mentally, now, she began discarding the extras. Those brown suede clogs, for instance: she could easily get rid of those. She had worn them exactly once and discovered that her heels hung half an inch over the backs, although she could have sworn they’d fit perfectly when she first tried them on.
“Plus another thing is, they’re so jealous,” the nursery man was saying. He grunted, and then she heard the thud of a rock or a root stob as he heaved it aside. “They phone you all the time and they ask you what you was doing if you take a minute to answer. They show up at your door and check out you’re not cheating on them. This one guy I know, he had to move to Arizona finally just to get shed of this woman who was always on his tail.”
“It’s more than a fellow can handle, sometimes,” the second man agreed.
Rebecca slid her chair back and rose to shut the window. She tried to make no noise, but she had a glimpse of two startled faces looking directly into her eyes before she turned away. When she had reseated herself, smoothing her skirt beneath her, she said, “You know, I’ve always regretted not completing my education.”
“You could do that now,” Will told her.
“Well, yes. Yes, I could! In fact, I’ve just started reading a biography of Robert E. Lee.”
“Lee,” Will said consideringly.
“Remember, how I had this new theory about Lee’s real reason for deciding to cast his lot with the South? And the other day I thought, I should go on with my research anyhow, just out of sheer curiosity.”
“Well, there you have it,” Will told her. “Laura’s got no curiosity whatsoever.”
Rebecca clucked. The telephone rang.
He said, “Don’t you want to answer that?”
“No, never mind.”
She waited till the ringing stopped, which seemed to take forever. Then she said, “So she isn’t a scholar.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Laura.”
“No, not in the least.”
She hoped he would elaborate, but just then the phone started ringing again.
“You certainly get a lot of calls,” Will told her.
“Yes,” she said. She sighed. “Won’t you have more chicken?”
“No, thanks, I couldn’t eat another bite.”
Her own plate was nearly untouched. Even so, she removed her napkin from her lap and prepared to slide her chair back. “I’ll go make us some coffee,” she said. “Would you prefer regular, or decaf?”
“Neither, thanks.”
“I can have it ready in a jiff.”
He said, “I never was in the habit of coffee, you may remember.”
She didn’t remember, actually. She remembered only that he hadn’t liked sweets—unusual, in a young man. But when she said, “I purposely did not fix a dessert,” he said, “Oh, that’s all right,” as if he thought she was apologizing.
“I mean, I didn’t suppose you’d want one.”
“No, really, I’m fine.”
She gave up. “Well,” she said, “shall we go into the parlor, then, where it’s comfortable?”
Instead of answering, he leaned toward her. The movement was so sudden that she wondered, for a second, whether he had a stomachache. “Rebecca,” he said, “it’s occurred to me that this was providential.”
“Was . . . what?”
“That first night you telephoned, I had just about hit bottom. It was so incredibly providential that you called me when you did, Rebecca.”
He reached across the table and gripped one of her hands. Unfortunately, it was the hand that held her scrunched-up napkin. Also, she felt an instantaneous, nearly overwhelming urge to wriggle her fingers frantically, like some kind of undersea creature. She forced them to stay motionless, although the urge was so intense that she was almost vibrating. At the same time she had to remember to make her eyes look wider than they normally were, and to keep her head raised high so that the cushion of flesh beneath her chin would not reveal itself.
Then the front door slammed against the closet, and Zeb called out, “We’re home!”
He had promised they wouldn’t be back till ten! Or nine-thirty, at the earliest! But here came Poppy’s cane tip-tapping through the two parlors, following Zeb’s softer tread. Will withdrew his hand.
“In the old days, ice-cream places offered unlimited samples,” Poppy was saying. “Any kind of flavor you liked—eggnog, pistachio, rum raisin—on little wooden spoons for you to try before you committed yourself.”
They arrived in the dining-room doorway. “Well, hi, there!” Zeb exclaimed, in what struck Rebecca as an artificial tone of voice.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him coolly.
“We stopped for ice cream after supper and Poppy was so displeased with the service, he said he’d just as soon have his dessert here at home.”
He was looking not at her but at Will, who had turned partway around in his seat to see him. Rebecca still had a distant hope of avoiding introductions—if Zeb and Poppy would only retire tactfully to the kitchen, while she and Will moved into the front parlor—but now Will rose and held out his hand. “How do you do,” he said. “I’m Will Allenby.”
“I’m Zeb, Rebecca’s brother-in-law,” Zeb said, shaking his hand. With his poor posture and his dingy, wire-rimmed glasses, his strings of oily gray hair hanging over his forehead, he seemed almost ugly tonight. “This is my uncle, Paul Davitch,” he said. “Sorry to barge in like this.”
“I thought you two were going to a movie,” Rebecca told him.
“We were considering a movie,” Poppy said, “but after the ice-cream fiasco I just didn’t have the heart for it.” He stood poised in the doorway, pivoting his cane with both hands as if he thought he was Fred Astaire.
“What fiasco was that?” Will asked him politely. (Too politely, in Rebecca’s opinion.)
“I told the girl at the counter I’d like a little taste of butterscotch ripple,” Poppy said, “and she gave me one and it was weak, just very frail and weak in flavor. So I said, ‘Well, I believe I’ll sample the coffee nugget next,’ and she said, ‘Sir!’ in this smart-aleck tone—not a respectful ‘sir’ by any manner of means. ‘Sir, if we gave out unlimited samples we wouldn’t have any product left to sell, now, would we.’”
Will clicked his tongue.
“Back in my day, folks were more accommodating,” Poppy said.
“Mine too,” Will told him.
“So we thought we’d come on home and see what you-all’s dessert was.”
“We’re not having any dessert,” Rebecca said. “I didn’t make one.”
“I’ll go look in the freezer, then. Check what flavors of ice cream we’ve got. Want some ice cream . . . um?” he asked Will.
“That’d be great,” Will said, and he sat down again.
Rebecca slumped in her seat.
Poppy set off for the kitchen, humming something tuneless. He was leaning on his cane hardly at all, for once. He had a jaunty lilt to his walk that struck Rebecca as infuriating.
“So!” Zeb said chummily. He pulled out the chair next to Will. “You knew our Rebecca back when she was in high school, I hear.”
“Our Rebecca?” she demanded.
“Oh, way before high school,” Will said. “I knew her in nursery school. I knew her when she was too young for any kind of school.”
“I bet she was quite something when she was a little kid.”
“She was cute, all right,” Will said.
Rebecca rolled her eyes.
“Well: cute,” Zeb said. “She was cute even when we met her. Showed up that very first evening in a blue dress and mat
ching blue shoes, carrying a purse that was shaped like a workman’s lunch box.”
Rebecca would not have expected him to remember that. She hoped he wouldn’t mention some other things he might remember—like that twentieth-birthday party, which had taken place when she and Will were supposedly still a couple.
Before Zeb could say any more, though, the front door slammed open again. “Beck?” NoNo called. “Are you home?”
“Out here,” Zeb called, and he cocked his head at Rebecca—trying to imply, no doubt, that now he wasn’t the only one who’d interrupted her evening.
Rebecca just glared at him.
NoNo had Peter with her. She was wearing her work clothes—a green smock with a yellow trowel embroidered on the pocket—and she looked tired and out of sorts. “Where were you?” she asked Rebecca. “I’ve been phoning and phoning all evening, and nobody ever answered and the machine wouldn’t pick up.”
“I was entertaining,” Rebecca said pointedly.
This didn’t faze NoNo for an instant. “Anyway,” she went on, “Peter wants to ask you—”
Rebecca said, “Will, I’d like you to meet my stepdaughter, NoNo Sanborn, and her stepson, Peter. This is Will Allenby.”
“Oh. Hi,” NoNo said. Will had stood up again when she entered, but they were too far apart to shake hands. “Peter wants to ask you something,” she told Rebecca.
“Will was my high-school boyfriend,” Rebecca said.
It seemed important to make this clear, although she wasn’t sure just why.
NoNo gave Will a second glance and said, “Really? Well. Nice to meet you.” Then she turned to Peter. “Tell Beck what you wanted to ask her,” she ordered.
Peter said, “Um, at my school they have this, what-do-you-call . . .”
He had combed his hair flat with water, or maybe one of those newfangled gels. He had a skinned-back, pale, nervous look, and when he laced his fingers together Rebecca could hear his knuckles crack. “It’s kind of like a, well, maybe, exhibit; an exhibit of these projects we’ve been working on, and the thing of it is . . .”
He gazed imploringly at NoNo. She smiled at him and nodded several times.
“I don’t know why they do this,” he said, “but they call the exhibit Grandparents’ Day, and they have us invite all our grandparents.”
