Back When We Were Grownups (28 page)

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 with 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.

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.

1.  Dry cleaner
   
2.  Make dental appointment for Peter
   
3.  Find someone to clean gutters
   
4.  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?”

“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.