by Anne Tyler
She expected NoNo to argue, but NoNo was busy going through her purse—a shiny little red-and-black box that matched her red-and-black dress. “I wanted to show you something,” she said, and she pulled out a folded sheet of paper.
Rebecca opened it and found a list, computer-printed.
Dry cleaner
Make dental appointment for Peter
Find someone to clean gutters
Buy my bro. a birthday present
Till the mention of a brother, she had assumed the list was NoNo’s. She looked up questioningly.
“Barry wrote that,” NoNo told her.
“So . . .”
“He wrote that for me. These are the things that I was supposed to do last week.”
“I see,” Rebecca said.
“Beck. When you and Dad got married, did you ever . . . Don’t take this the wrong way, but did you ever wonder if he’d married you just so he would have help with us kids?”
Rebecca opened her mouth to answer, but NoNo rushed on. “I’m trying not to think that of Barry, but look at this list! And he’s always saying, ‘Boy, married life is great.’ He says, ‘Things are so much easier now. I don’t know what we did before you came along,’ and while naturally I’m flattered, still it does cross my mind that—”
“Are you saying you don’t think he loves you?” Rebecca asked.
“Well, I know he says he does, but . . . these lists! And the car pool, and the PTA meetings! Everything falls to me, which of course makes sense in a way because he does work longer hours, but . . . it’s like he’s saying, ‘Oh, good, now that I have a wife I don’t have to bother with any of that busywork anymore.’ It’s like I’m so useful.”
“But, sweetie,” Rebecca said, “isn’t he useful, too? Before, you were all alone in the world. I remember once I asked you why you never took a vacation, and you said if you had a man in your life, someone to travel with, you said—”
“Beck, you know how I get these pictures sometimes,” NoNo said. “Pictures behind my eyelids about the future. Well, the morning after my wedding, I was starting to wake up but my eyes weren’t open yet and I got the most distinct, most detailed, most realistic picture. I saw myself walking up Charles Street, that part where it splits for the monument. I was wheeling a baby carriage and I was wearing a maid’s uniform. Gray dress, white apron, white shoes, those white, nurse kind of stockings that always make women’s legs look fat—”
Rebecca laughed.
“I’m glad you find it amusing,” NoNo said bitterly.
“Maybe the point was the baby carriage. Did you think of that?”
“The point,” NoNo said, “was that I was wearing servant clothes.”
“Well, maybe the picture was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time! After all, you predicted Min Foo would have a girl, didn’t you? And then something else, what was it, some other mistake—”
Too late, she realized that she was thinking of what Patch had said: that NoNo couldn’t be very clairvoyant if she’d chosen to marry Barry.
“At any rate,” she said, “doesn’t it seem to you, really, that all of us love people at least partly for their usefulness?”
“No, it does not,” NoNo said. “I would never do such a thing! Never! I fell in love with Barry because he was so gallant and romantic, and he had that kind of eyebrows I like that crinkle up all perplexed.”
“Well, I don’t mean—”
“Forget it,” NoNo told her. “I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned it. So! Shall I take these bottles out? Will two be enough, do you think?”
“Oh. Maybe not,” Rebecca said, and she went over to the refrigerator. “What I meant was—” she said, but when she turned around, a third bottle in her hand, she found that NoNo had already left the room with the first two. Her purse remained on the table, with the list beside it. Rebecca picked up the list and studied it again.
“Min Foo says to remind you she’s having club soda,” Biddy said, walking in. “Shall I pour it? Is there any in the fridge?”
“Yes, there should be,” Rebecca told her absently.
“What’s that you’re reading?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Biddy peered over her shoulder. “Barry’s list,” she said.
“You’ve seen it?”
“Everybody’s seen it. But it was tactless of her to trouble you with that, just now.”
“Tactless? Why?”
“Oh, no reason,” Biddy said hastily. “Never mind me; I’m just babbling.”
“I don’t know why people in this family are so unhappy,” Rebecca told her. “Look at Min Foo! I’m worried to death she’s going to get another divorce.”
Biddy merely shook her head and removed the ice bin from the freezer.
“Last week,” Rebecca said, “she told me this long-winded tale about something unforgivable that Hakim was supposed to have done. You’d think he’d committed ax murder! And all it was, was they were driving someplace together and Hakim took the wrong road and insisted on staying on it.”
“He didn’t like the inefficiency of a U-turn,” Biddy said. “That’s what she said he called it: the inefficiency.”
“Oh, she told you this, too?”
“He wanted to keep on the way they were headed and just sort of meander in the right direction at some point in the future.”
“But that’s the way men are,” Rebecca said. “It’s nothing to get divorced about.”
“I said the same thing, exactly.” Biddy dropped ice cubes into a glass. “I said, ‘Min Foo, you two should go for some help. Ask Patch for the name of her marriage counselor,’ I told her.”
“Patch has a marriage counselor?”
“I thought you knew.”
“All these problems!” Rebecca said. “Thank goodness for you and Troy, at least.”
Biddy stiffened. “Just because Troy is gay doesn’t mean we don’t quarrel like other couples,” she told Rebecca.
“How reassuring to hear that,” Rebecca said.
She’d intended to sound witty, but her words fell dully, and Biddy didn’t smile.
They left the kitchen—Biddy with Min Foo’s club soda, Rebecca with the champagne. In the dining room they passed Peter and Joey, who were seated at one end of the table. Peter was demonstrating some kind of game. “First you take a ballpoint pen and lay it flat,” he said, “with the little air hole facing up. See the little air hole? Then you hold another pen exactly a foot above it, and you aim at the air hole and stab. Like this.” He jabbed the second pen downward, rattling all the place settings. “The winner is whoever’s the first to break the pen on the table. Your turn.”
Rebecca felt slightly cheered by this scene. (Joey, four years Peter’s junior, was hanging worshipfully on Peter’s every word.) She dropped back to watch for a second, putting off joining the others.
When she arrived in the parlor, NoNo was setting out glasses while Zeb poured the champagne. Biddy was discussing her book. “Recipes for old people can be difficult,” she was saying, “because they tend not to eat much. Also they’re often arthritic, which makes peeling and chopping and stirring just about impossible. Not to mention they’ve lost all sense of taste.”
“Oh, what’s the point, then?” Rebecca burst out.
Biddy stopped speaking and looked at her.
“I mean . . . it must present quite a challenge,” Rebecca said after a moment.
“Exactly,” Biddy told her. “So what I’ve tried to do . . .” And on she went, while Barry circled the room handing each person a drink.
Poppy had the couch to himself, having stretched his cane the length of it to keep everyone else away. “Psst!” he said to Rebecca. “Come here; I saved you a seat.” He waggled his cane invitingly.
She sat down without removing the cane, perching on just the front of the cushion.
“I was thinking people might like to hear my poem,” he told her.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Shall I recite it?�
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“Why not,” she said.
He hesitated.
“I can’t seem to think of the words,” he said. “Let me have a minute, will you?”
Someone pushed a glass of champagne into Rebecca’s hands. Lateesha, helping out. “Thank you, dear,” Rebecca said.
“I just need to get some kind of running start,” Poppy was saying. “Otherwise, it won’t come to me. How does it begin, again?”
“I don’t know,” she told him.
She really didn’t, she realized.
She was conscious of a lull in the conversation, and she looked up to find everybody turned in her direction, each person holding a glass, waiting for her to propose the toast. She assembled herself. She got to her feet and raised her own glass. “To Biddy,” she said, “and The White Gourmet.”
“Gray! Gray!” they corrected her. Someone gave a quick bark of a laugh.
“Sorry,” she said. She sat down.
There was a brief silence. Then everybody drank.
* * *
Not counting the baby, there were thirteen at the table. This was one more person than could comfortably be seated, but a separate children’s table with only three children—or four, if Dixon was exiled as well—would have seemed too puny. So Rebecca had everyone scrunch together, and she put Poppy next to her at the head although there wasn’t room. He was still trying to remember the words of his poem. He said, “This has never happened before.”
Rebecca patted his hand, which was practically in her plate. “Could you scoot about two inches the other way?” she asked him.
“Then I wouldn’t even be sitting at the table anymore, Beck.”
“Oh, all right.”
Biddy seemed to have taken over the serving duties. Actually, Rebecca might have let things lapse a little, there. Biddy kept coming out of the kitchen to ask things like, “Don’t you have any more butter?”
“Try the door shelf in the fridge,” Rebecca said.
“I already did. You don’t have anything! I can’t find more salt for the salt cellars, either. You don’t have any backups in the pantry!”
Barry was carving the turkey, Rebecca was glad to see. Zeb always made a mess of it. NoNo and Min Foo were passing plates around, and Hakim was jiggling a squirmy, whimpery Abdul on his shoulder. “I think this little man has gas,” he announced, and Lateesha said, “Ooh! Gross!” and crumpled into a cascade of giggles behind her fingers.
Biddy asked, “Where’s the sauerkraut? Did you not remember the sauerkraut this year?”
“Back in 1923,” Poppy began, “when folks still thought that squirrel meat was good for chronic invalids . . .”
Joey was eyeing Peter across the table, trying to get his attention, and Troy was discussing music with Zeb—or singing notes to him, at any rate. “Dah, dee dah-dah,” he sang, holding up one index finger instructively.
Barry said, “Oh, no!” He stopped carving, his knife halfway through a thigh joint. “I didn’t wait for the blessing!” he told Rebecca.
“Never mind,” she said.
“I just started right in on the carving! I wasn’t thinking!”
“Um, actually, we don’t normally have a blessing.”
“You don’t?”
He got that rumple-browed look that NoNo seemed to find so fetching.
“Not even a moment of silence?” he asked.
“Well, I suppose—”
“Or, I know what!” He brightened. “We could do what my college girlfriend’s family used to do. They went around the table and people each said one thing apiece that they were thankful for.”
This struck Rebecca as a terrible idea. She was relieved when Zeb gave a groan.
But Barry didn’t seem to hear him. “What do you say, you guys?” he asked. And then, when no one spoke up, “Well, I’m not shy. I’ll go first. I’m thankful as all get-out to have my beautiful NoNo.”
NoNo looked at him. She lowered the basket of rolls that she’d been about to pass to Dixon, although Dixon was still reaching for it, and, “Why, Barry,” she said softly. “I’m thankful to have you, too.”
Joey made a gagging sound, but Min Foo frowned him into silence. It was clear, from the way people started stirring in their seats and clearing their throats, that they were bracing themselves to go through with this.
Rebecca looked beseechingly at Zeb. He grinned. All very well for him; she supposed he would say he was thankful for some kind of Child Welfare Act or something. And here was Hakim, plainly intrigued by this unfamiliar American custom but putting his own stamp on it; for he rose to his feet, still jiggling Abdul, as if he were preparing to deliver a formal speech. “I personally,” he said, “am thankful for my wife, Min Foo, and for my son, Abdul. And also for my other son, Joey, and my daughter, Lateesha. In addition, I would like to take this moment to—”
“Enough!” Min Foo said. She was laughing. “Time’s up, Hakim!”
Which, for some reason, set the baby off. He let out a sudden wail, and although he might have settled down again, Rebecca recognized an opportunity when it came along. She stood up and reached for him. “I’ll take him,” she said. And the instant she had him, she made away with him, out of the dining room completely.
Out of the dining room and through the parlors, toward the stairs. But in the foyer, she paused. She hoisted the baby higher on her shoulder and opened the front door. It wasn’t raining anymore, although a thick mist still hung like veils. The air was soft and mild, a kind of non-temperature against her skin. She stepped outside and shut the door behind her.
The baby, who had been uttering chirps of protest, abruptly stopped and raised his head from her shoulder to look around.
She walked down the front walk and turned right, passing the meditation center and the blue-gable house. The mist was so dense that the baby started making small gulping sounds, as if he thought he was underwater. She figured he must be warm enough, though, because he was swaddled in a receiving blanket. His little body felt compact and solid, much heavier than the last time she had carried him, and he held himself in a more organized, more collected sort of way.
She crossed the street toward a maple sapling that still had a few of its leaves, red as lipstick. “See?” she told the baby. “Red! Isn’t it pretty?” She turned him slightly so that he was facing the sapling. He blinked and let his gaze travel across it, his head bobbling slightly with the effort of concentration. He no longer had that squinchy newborn look; he was wide-eyed and alert. His cheek, when she set hers against it, was so silky that she almost couldn’t feel it.
They had so far had the street to themselves—they’d had the whole world to themselves—but now a bus loomed out of the fog and stopped beside them. The doors opened with a wheeze, letting off two dark-eyed young women, one of them obviously pregnant. They were followed by a tall young man in glasses, and the three of them stood at the bus stop a moment laughing and interrupting each other, riding over each other’s words, talking about a party they had been to the night before. Then they moved off down the street, and as their voices faded, Rebecca noticed the quiet surrounding her and the baby. It was that cottony, thick, enclosing quiet that often descends with a fog, and it made her long, all at once, for the clamor of her family.
Anyhow, Abdul must be getting hungry. He was nosing hopefully into the crook of her neck. She turned and started home.
The mist was settling on her hair. She could see the glints in the strands that fell over her eyes. The hem of her skirt was growing heavy with moisture. The baby’s mouth against her skin felt like a cool little guppy mouth.
Had it ever crossed her mind that Joe had married her for her usefulness? Yes, it had crossed her mind. And never more so than after he died; just up and willfully died and left her to cope on her own.
Now, though, she saw what he had rescued her from: that ingrown, muted, stagnant, engaged-to-be-engaged routine that had started to chafe her so. Oh, he had been just as useful to her; no doubt about
it. What she’d told NoNo was true.
And while she had once believed that she’d been useful only in practical matters (tending the little girls, waiting on Mother Davitch), now she saw that her most valuable contribution had been her joyousness—a quality the Davitches sorely lacked. Not that she herself was joyous to begin with. No, she had had to labor at it. She had struggled to acquire it.
Timidly, she experimented with a sneaking sense of achievement. Pride, even. Why not? It didn’t seem all that misplaced.
She carried the baby home jauntily, striding straight through the puddles, wearing jewels of mist in her hair and holding her head high.
Eleven
As luck would have it, Poppy’s party fell on a day when two paying events could have been scheduled instead. One was just a small luncheon, but the other was a Christmas party for a brokerage firm, and Rebecca was very sorry to have to turn it down. A promise was a promise, though. She had told Poppy they would celebrate on his actual birth date. Enough of these second-best, orphan compromises—major milestones observed midweek or shoved into the next month so as not to interfere with more important people’s arrangements.
So: December 11th, a Saturday. The plan was to begin at two in the afternoon, for the little ones’ sake, and extend into early evening. Presents were not discouraged. (Poppy had been firm about that.) Food would be served from the very beginning; none of this waiting around for the toasts. Lots of desserts, but no savories, no hors d’oeuvres or crudités, certainly no main dishes. And the centerpiece would be a towering cake, really more of a wedding cake, prepared by Toot Sweet in Fells Point. Poppy had done the research: Toot Sweet was the winner. Fortunately, Biddy didn’t take offense. “Fine with me,” she said. “I have enough on my hands with all those pastries he wants.”
The guest list—saved these past six months in the pocket of Rebecca’s calico skirt, where it had gone through the laundry twice and emerged as soft as blotting paper but still comparatively readable—consisted mostly of family, plus two of Poppy’s old friends, plus some incidental acquaintances like his physical therapist and Alice Farmer. (It was ironic, Rebecca often reflected, that by definition those family parties that were largest and most demanding were the ones to which Alice Farmer had to be invited as a guest.) There had been more people on the list, but many of them were dead. A few others were too frail to attend, and a few had simply dropped out of sight at some unnoticed point in the past.
