by Anne Tyler
“And flowers?” Mrs. Mink was asking. “Paulina tells me you can recommend a florist.”
“Yes, NoNo,” Rebecca said.
“Pardon?”
“My stepdaughter, NoNo Sanborn. She could set out white asters and those pale-blue flowers, those what-do-you-call-them . . .”
In fact, Rebecca couldn’t think offhand of any flowers that were blue, except for those chicory blossoms that grew wild along the highways and closed up in tight little winces if you picked them. She said, “I can’t remember. I don’t know. I don’t have any idea.”
“Well, that’s all right, we’ll just ask your—”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’ll have to call you back,” Rebecca said, and she replaced the receiver, which all of a sudden weighed too much to hold on to any longer.
* * *
Lately, she’d been feeling so . . . What was the word? Blank. Low in spirit, flat as a desert; and now she grew more so every day. Getting up in the morning was like hauling a dead body. Food lost its flavor. Conversation required calling upon every muscle, summoning her last particle of strength. She kept noticing how very little there was in this world to talk about. It was turning into a beautiful fall—clear and mild, the leaves staying on the trees much later than usual—but the brilliant colors hurt her eyes, and the meditation center’s banner flapping in the breeze made a sinister, leathery sound, like bat wings.
Not a person in the family asked where Will had disappeared to. Well, except for her mother. (“Oh, Rebecca,” she said sadly, once she’d heard the facts, “you were a fool thirty-three years ago and you’re a fool today.”) But the girls behaved as if he had never existed. She suspected they were trying to spare her feelings—taking it for granted, no doubt, that she had been jilted.
One night when she had nothing to do she got in her car and drove to Macadam. She parked in front of Mrs. Flick’s house and gazed up at the second-floor windows. All of them were dark, though. Which was lucky, she supposed, because really it was the romance she missed; not Will himself. Still, she sat there a long, long time before she started her engine and drove home again.
She told Zeb, in one of their bedtime phone talks, that she thought the human life span was too long. “Really, I’ve finished my life,” she said. “I finished it when the girls got grown. But here I am, just hanging around, marking time, waiting for things to wind down.”
Zeb said, “Rebecca? Are you all right?”
“Define ‘all right,’” she told him.
“Where is your man friend?” he asked.
“He’s gone.”
“You ditched him?”
“Yes, but that’s not the problem. The problem is, I’ve outlived myself.”
“Well,” he told her, “remember what George Eliot said.”
“What did George Eliot say?”
“Or maybe it wasn’t George Eliot. At any rate: ‘It’s never too late to do what you want to do.’ Remember that.”
“What?” Rebecca said. “Well, of all the—Why, that’s just plain wrong! Suppose I wanted to . . . I don’t know; suppose I wanted to get pregnant! That’s just plain ridiculous!”
She was so outraged that she hung up, not knowing she was planning to. Then she regretted it. When the phone rang a few seconds later, she lifted the receiver and said, “Sorry.”
“I just remembered,” Zeb said. “It wasn’t ‘do what you want to do.’ It was ‘be what you want to be.’ I think.”
“I’m just feeling a little tired,” Rebecca told him.
“And I don’t even know for sure that it was George Eliot.”
She said, “Thanks for trying, Zeb.”
* * *
She might have thrown herself into work, but business was very slow these days. Three different people had called to ask if the Open Arms was in a safe neighborhood, and although she had assured them it was—with reasonable precautions, she said; using normal common sense—they told her they would have to think it over and get back to her.
Besides, how often could a person celebrate? How many weddings, christenings, birthdays could she applaud, for heaven’s sake? What was the purpose of it all?
Her New York Times collected in stacks and gradually turned yellow, untouched. Her New Yorkers drifted to Poppy’s room and she never asked for them back. She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.
One morning the library phoned to say that her interlibrary loan was in, and she made herself walk over to collect it. But it turned out the book was so rare—a crumbly brown leather volume edged in flaking gold—that she was not allowed to take it home with her. She had to read it there in the reading room, the librarian told her. (This was the same librarian who’d arranged the loan in the first place, but she issued her edict in such a disapproving voice, with such a humorless, raisin face, that Rebecca couldn’t imagine why she’d once seemed a kindred spirit.)
She did try. She did settle at a table and pluck the cover open with the very tips of her fingers and leaf obediently through the brittle ivory pages. A Baltimorean’s Experience of the War for Southern Independence, the book was called. The author was a lawyer named Nathaniel Q. Furlong, Esq., who claimed to have known Robert E. Lee when Lee was still a private citizen. Years before the War, Mr. Furlong maintained, Lee had confided to him that he could never support a cause that would allow the slaves—the “heathen Africans,” in his words—to return to their native land and forfeit their one chance for Christian salvation. But when Rebecca managed to locate this passage (which was, she saw for the first time, of dubious credibility, written by a man whose boastful, unreliable nature revealed itself in every line), she wondered why she had found it so momentous back in college. She had just wanted to believe, she supposed, that there were grander motivations in history than mere family and friends, mere domestic happenstance.
She returned the book to the librarian, and she brushed the crumbs of leather off her hands and left the building.
* * *
Everything struck her as unutterably sad—even the squirrel with half a tail she saw bustling cheerfully down the sidewalk. Even Poppy’s daily routine: his ritual round of activities, straightening his room and brushing his hat and tuning in his TV shows, all intended to keep himself from sinking into hopelessness.
She knew her mood had something to do with the season. Autumn was when Joe had died. She couldn’t look at the poplar outside her bedroom window—the leaves so yellow that she would think she had left a light on, some cloudy days in mid- or late October—without recalling that shattered morning when she had emerged from the hospital in a stupor and taken forever finding her car and then driven bleakly, numbly down streets lined with radiant trees in every shade of red and gold and orange.
As a girl she had often said, about some potential disaster, “Oh, that can’t happen; it’s too bad to happen.” But Joe’s death had been too bad to happen, and it had happened even so. She had felt stunned by that all through his funeral—through the thready whine of the organ and the uncertain, off-key hymns and the peculiar poem Zeb had read called “Not Waving but Drowning.” She had sat through that funeral white-faced with shock. It appeared that nothing was too bad to happen. How had she ever thought otherwise?
Grieving had turned out to be not unlike falling in love. She had pored over Joe’s photographs, searched for the innermost meanings of his calendar notations, traced his dear signature on canceled checks. She had found any excuse to mention his name: “Joe always felt . . .” and, “Joe used to say . . .” It had troubled her that she could summon up no specific, start-to-finish memory of their lovemaking; only generalities. (He was a morning man. He liked to kiss her eyelids. He had a way of almost purring when she touched him.) She prayed for random moments to resurface. Once, driving along in her car, she was thrilled to recollect that he used to talk to t
he mirror while he was shaving. (“Ah, there you are, Joe. Ready for another glorious day of helping strangers get drunk together.”) She received this image like a gift, and clung to it, and waited greedily for more.
Her life, as she saw it back then, had begun on an April evening when she had stood on the sidewalk peering at the sign overhead: The Open Arms, Est. 1951. And now her life was finished, but here she was, still circulating among the guests, a solitary splinter of a woman in the crowd.
“Well, you know what they say,” Zeb had told her. (Zeb at twenty-two, full of callow assurance.) “God never gives you more than you can handle.”
“Who says that? Who?” she had asked in a fury. “Who would dare to say that?”
“I don’t know,” he had said, taken aback. “God, maybe?”
Causing her to start laughing, even while the tears were streaming down her face.
Joe’s November dental appointment, noted in his own jaunty hand with his stubby-nibbed fountain pen, came and went without him. His battery-run watch went on ticking in his drawer.
The worst days had been the ones where she had time enough to think. She thought, What am I going to do with all the years ahead of me? The easier days were the chaotic ones, where she proceeded from minute to minute just dealing with demands. Soothing the children, cooking their meals, helping with their homework. Standing stolid and expressionless when NoNo pushed her away and ran sobbing to her room, or when Patch asked, “Why couldn’t you have died, and Daddy gone on living?”
Some people, she often noticed, had experiences in their pasts that defined them forever after, that they felt compelled to divulge to any casual acquaintance at the outset. The loss of a child, for example: almost anyone who had been through that had to mention it first thing; and no wonder. With Rebecca, it was the fact of her instant motherhood. That had been the most profound change in her life; it had made her understand that this was her life, for real, and not some story floating past. Which may have been the true reason that she still used the term stepdaughter long after the girls themselves, come to think of it, might have allowed her to drop it. And when she had become their one and only parent (for no one seemed to count Tina), she was all the more aware of the unpredictable, unimaginable shape her life had taken.
Once, introducing “my stepdaughters,” she had happened to include Min Foo with a thoughtless wave of her hand. Min Foo had never let her forget it. “I’m sorry! It was an accident!” Rebecca told her, but privately, she had suspected that it revealed something significant. Min Foo was just as much her own separate self, just as different from Rebecca, as the other three were. And in some ways, she was less of a comfort, because she was the youngest and her memories of Joe were fewer. As the years went by, the older girls would reminisce with Rebecca—“Do you remember the time we all got on the train to D.C. and just as we were pulling out, we saw Dad standing there on the platform with the pretzels he’d gone to buy?” Rebecca would nod and laugh, and Min Foo would look from one face to another like someone seeking admission. “Did he ever sing to me?” she asked once. “I think he did. I seem to remember him singing to me while I was lying in bed.”
“I don’t believe so,” Rebecca said, “but I know he read to you.”
“What did he read?”
“Oh, just the usual. Winnie-the-Pooh . . .”
But you couldn’t reconstruct a person from bald facts. Min Foo would never experience the details of him—the fine-grained skin on the backs of his hands and the curly corners of his eyes when he smiled. (One time a man invited Rebecca out, a year or two after Joe’s death, and she accepted but then was filled with despair at the sight of the wiry red hairs on his forearms. He wasn’t Joe, was the problem. He was a perfectly nice man, but he wasn’t Joe.) And to the grandchildren, Joe was no more distinct than those names you see on nineteenth-century headstones. Joseph Aaron Davitch. He used to exist, was all. And now did not.
Oh, he would have made a fine old man. A fine old man. Sixty-six this past September; imagine. Rebecca was older now than he had even been, although she continued, to this day, to think of him as her senior. And he would have loved having grandchildren.
She used to assume that the bereaved were actually mourning for themselves, and of course that was partly true. But what she hadn’t expected was the sorrow she felt on behalf of Joe. She ached to think of all that he was missing—the various landmarks in the girls’ lives and the daily pleasures and the minor family triumphs.
At first she had thought, I wish I could tell him such-and-such, and, He would have enjoyed so-and-so. Then the years began to telescope, so that if he came back today and asked, “What’s happened since I’ve been gone?” she would say, “Oh, well, I don’t know. This and that, I guess.” Like someone long dead herself, she would see that none of her little world’s events had really been that important.
“How come the front parlor’s cream now?” he would ask. “Where did you put my tennis racquet? What became of that big old oak that used to stand on the corner?” And she would say, “Oh! You’re right: the parlor used to be gray. Your racquet? You played tennis? I’d forgotten there was an oak. I think it was struck by lightning.” She would feel unaccountably guilty; you would think it was Joe she’d forgotten. Although it wasn’t, of course.
Now she braced herself against autumn as if it were a buffeting wind that she had to endure with her eyes tight shut and her jaw clenched, holding on to the nearest support for all she was worth. October, heartlessly dazzling. November, dropping leaves like a puddle of gold beneath the poplar. Sometimes, when nobody was around, she spent half the afternoon gazing blindly out the window. Or she let the telephone ring and ring while she sat listening. The sound was a satisfaction. It was an even greater satisfaction when the ringing finally stopped.
* * *
“I suppose you’re going to insist on some kind of brouhaha for Thanksgiving,” Min Foo told her.
Thanksgiving?
Well, yes: November. She couldn’t think how it had slipped her mind.
Thanksgiving was the one holiday when Rebecca did all the cooking. This had developed after a famous Thanksgiving when Biddy served braised pheasant and steamed quinoa in white truffle oil. There had been a sort of revolution, and Biddy had stalked out in a huff and Rebecca was put in charge forever after. Which was fine with her. She didn’t mind the hard work; she welcomed it, in fact. But she dreaded the socializing. All that merriment! She would have to be so cheery! She wondered what would happen if she simply didn’t bother. If the girls started one of their quarrels and she just let it happen. If the moment for the toast came and went and she just slugged her drink down in silence.
Still, she made out her grocery list. Went to the store. Baked the cornbread ahead for the stuffing. Had Alice Farmer come in to give both parlors a good going-over.
Alice Farmer planned to celebrate Thanksgiving at her sister’s. “You know my sister Eunice, the one who’s blessed with the gift of healing,” she said. Rebecca folded her hands across her stomach and looked down at them. More veins crisscrossed them than she had ever noticed, knotted and blue and gnarly. Alice Farmer stopped dust-mopping and said, “Miz Davitch?”
“I’m sorry; what?” Rebecca asked.
“Maybe you ought to take this remedy that my Aunt Ruth takes,” Alice Farmer told her. “It’s real good for your nerves, but you can only buy it in Georgia.”
“Okay,” Rebecca said after a pause.
“Okay what? You want her to get you some?”
“No, that’s okay,” Rebecca said.
She thought that if she were shown a photograph of these hands, she might not even know they were hers.
* * *
Everybody attended except for Patch and her family; they were spending the holiday with Jeep’s parents. And everybody, of course, was late, which caused no particular problem because Rebecca had counted on that when she put the turkey in. Zeb showed up first, then Min Foo and her brood, then NoNo wit
h Barry and Peter. It had been sprinkling all morning, and most of them wore raincoats that dripped across the foyer. Underneath, though, they had on their best clothes. They always dressed up for Thanksgiving—much more than for Christmas, to which the youngest children wore pajamas. Rebecca, though, was not dressed up. She had sort of forgotten. She was wearing the sweatshirt and flounced denim skirt that she had put on when she got out of bed. “Shall I watch things in the kitchen while you run change?” Min Foo asked her.
Rebecca said, “Oh, thanks,” but then the door slammed open again, letting in Biddy’s contingent, and Rebecca stayed where she was.
Biddy had good news: her book for senior citizens, The Gray Gourmet, had been accepted by a small press. She announced this even before she took her raincoat off, with Troy and Dixon beaming on either side of her. The first to offer congratulations was Barry. “That’s great!” he said. “I’ve got an author for a sister-in-law!” Then Zeb asked what the publication date was. She didn’t know yet, Biddy said. Then everybody looked at Rebecca.
Min Foo said, finally, “Maybe we should break out some champagne.”
Rebecca said, “Oh. I’ll go get it.”
In the kitchen, she took two bottles of champagne from the refrigerator. Then she peeked in the oven to check on the turkey, and she lowered the flame beneath the potatoes, and after that she fell into a little trance at the window. The fog outside was made denser by the foggy panes, which were clouded with steam from the stove. Raindrops marbled the glass.
NoNo walked in and said, “Beck, I wanted to—Oh!”
She was looking at Will’s plant, which had migrated to the kitchen and grown another six inches. “Good heavens, it’s a tree!” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’m thinking of moving it out to the yard,” Rebecca told her.
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that in November. The first frost would probably kill it.”
“What happens happens, is my philosophy,” Rebecca said.
