Back When We Were Grownups (8 page)

“Oh, she’s celebrating, for sure,” Rebecca said. “Along with you two, I trust,” she added, sending them each a glance. Ida beamed and nodded. Rebecca’s mother gazed thoughtfully at a rainbow afghan on the floor. “What she means is, she doesn’t want anything formal. And that’s partly because of her age but more, I think, because Barry’s been married before.”

“Well, what has that got to do with the price of eggs in China?” Ida asked.

“Tea,” Rebecca’s mother said.

“What?”

“
Tea
in China.”

“The bride is the one who counts,” Ida said. “You tell her so, Rebecca. Tell her to have a long white dress, a veil—the works. Flower girls, attendants . . . Tell her Barry should have a best man. Maybe his son, if he’s old enough. Is he old enough?”

“He’s twelve.”

“That’s plenty old enough!”

“Well, maybe,” Rebecca said. “He’s kind of a young twelve, though.”

“How does he get along with NoNo?”

“All right, I guess. It’s hard to say. He’s very quiet. At our Fourth of July barbeque, he just sat in a corner and read a book.”

“Well, he’s going to love you-all once he gets to know you,” Ida said.

She passed the candy again, but this time Rebecca and her mother both refused. Ida herself was the only one who took a second piece. “Law,” she said, licking each finger daintily, “it seems like yesterday we three were planning
your
wedding! You made the prettiest bride.”

“Well, I certainly had a pretty dress,” Rebecca said, because the dress had been sewn by her mother and Ida, working almost around the clock. (She’d given them two weeks’ notice.)

“We took down all your measurements and then you lost eight pounds, remember? We got to Baltimore the day of the wedding and found you just a shadow of your former self. Right up till time for the ceremony we had to baste and pin and tuck . . . You’d turned into a skeleton! I guess it was bridal jitters.”

Rebecca had been nowhere near a skeleton; just slightly less fat than usual. And that was due to pure happiness, not to jitters. She had been so extravagantly happy! She hadn’t been able to eat or sleep. She had walked around in a trance.

Yet that wedding had made a great many people unhappy. The boyfriend whom she’d jilted, needless to say; but also her mother and Ida, who had never so much as heard Joe’s name before she stunned them with her news on an unannounced trip home. “Wait: I thought you were marrying Will,” her mother had said. And, “You’ve known this person
how
long? He makes his living doing
what
?” And finally, “I just have to point out, Rebecca, that this is mighty convenient for him. A case where a man is so needful, where a wife would be so useful. Three little girls to take care of! And their mother nowhere in sight! I guess he
would
want to marry!”

Rebecca had accused her mother of doubting that anyone could love her. She had left the house in tears, slamming the door behind her, vowing not to return. “I never said . . . !” her mother called, trailing her down the driveway. “I only meant . . . Couldn’t you first have a long engagement? What’s your hurry?”

A question asked as well by people at Macadam—her faculty advisor and her history professor. Why sacrifice a college degree, they said, to marry a near-stranger thirteen years her senior? Why not wait till she graduated?

And on Joe’s side, there were his daughters. Oh, his mother was ecstatic; you’d think the whole romance was her idea. And the other adults seemed delighted. But his daughters were stony-faced and resistant. They left Rebecca’s chirpy remarks hanging foolishly in midair, and they found a million reasons to mention “our mama” in her presence. More than once, in those two weeks before the wedding, they had made Rebecca cry.

So many tears, now that she looked back! It hadn’t been pure happiness after all. Part of that time, she’d been miserable.

But always there was Joe.

He drew her close and she pressed her face against his ropy brown throat. He called her his corn-fed girl, his creamy one, his beautiful blond milkmaid. (All those dairy-type references.) He wiped her eyes with his handkerchief that carried his smell of warm toast.

So was it the happiness or the misery that had made her lose those eight pounds?

Which, anyway, she had regained soon enough after the wedding.

Her mother and Aunt Ida were on the next subject by now—or the next two subjects. Her mother was saying that lately it seemed any chair she sat in was a struggle to get out of, and Ida was saying simultaneously that it wasn’t only her vet who had retired but her doctor as well, and also her podiatrist, both of them replaced by mere whippersnapper youngsters. There was a pause, and then Ida said, “Old again”—announcing yet another convergence of topics. And they sighed and started off their next two conversational paths.

*  *  *

For supper her mother served chicken salad and peas. She spent a long time on her preparations, because she believed in taking no shortcuts. First she had to disjoint a hen and poach it, then make her own mayonnaise with a little hand-cranked eggbeater. Rebecca was not allowed to help because, her mother said, she tended to be too slapdash. “You can set the table, though,” she said, as if offering a gift, but then she did it over again after Rebecca had finished—squaring the place mats and straightening the silver. Rebecca gave up and sat down to watch while her mother ran water into a pitcher and emptied it three times before finally letting it fill.

“I was wondering,” Rebecca said. “Instead of moving to Havenhurst, why not invite Aunt Ida to live here with you? She’s alone and you’re alone. Wouldn’t it make sense?”

“Goodness, no, she talks too much,” her mother said. “Besides, it’s not that I want to live
with
somebody. I just don’t want to live by myself.”

Rebecca laughed, but she understood what her mother meant.

“Also, Ida’s so messy,” her mother said. “And more difficult to get along with than you might suppose. Did you try her Froot Loop candy? It was sweet enough to give me an earache! Yet she turned down those peppermint patties at my house. Well, I know why she turned them down. She wasn’t on any diet; no, sir. She just prides herself on being the generous one. She doesn’t like to switch roles. It interferes with her theory of the universe, that I should be the one to bring her a plate of goodies.”

Meanwhile, she was putting away the napkins that Rebecca had set out and bringing forth others—neither better nor worse, just different. Rebecca smiled to herself.

After they had finished their meal (which was, as always, bland and pallid-tasting, so underseasoned that no amount of salt seemed able to set things right), they watched the news on the huge old black-and-white TV in the living room. “Oh, honestly,” her mother kept telling the announcer. “Oh, for gracious sake.” She plucked irritably at the crease in her slacks. “Look at that,” she said when a group of congressmen appeared on the screen. “Children are running the country now. Every one of those men is younger than I am.”

“Well, but . . .” Rebecca said. She hesitated. She said, “Everyone just about everywhere’s younger than you are, by now.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that, thank you,” her mother said. “But it’s more noticeable, somehow, when they’re the government. You know? If I thought about it long enough—the whole U.S. in these people’s hands—I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”

“For me,” Rebecca said, “it’s just the opposite. Those men are younger than I am, too; at least a lot of them are. But I look at their gray hair and I think, ‘
Old
guys,’ as if I didn’t realize that I’m getting old myself.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” her mother said. “Fifty-three! A mere child.”

The congressmen faded away and a throng of soldiers appeared, wearing antique uniforms but sauntering across a field in a distinctly modern, offhand manner. They were reenacting one of the major battles of the Civil War, a reporter explained. Every attempt had been made to ensure that their equipment was authentic, although of course they were not using live ammunition.

“Men,” Rebecca’s mother said. “If they can’t find any good reason to fight, they have to make one up.”

The clock on the mantel struck the quarter hour, playing part of a hymn in golden-throated notes. One of the men fell down on a hillock of grass.

“Do you remember your paper on Robert E. Lee?” her mother asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“You invented this whole new theory about why he chose to side with the South. Remember? Your professor was thrilled.”

“Professor Lundgren,” Rebecca recalled. She hadn’t thought of him in years—his high, veined forehead and translucent hair.

“Come see him in his office, he said. He had such big plans for you! That’s when you decided to change your major to history.”

Rebecca said, “Oh, well.” She was afraid they might be working around to how she’d dropped out of college. “No great loss, really,” she said. “I don’t think it was history that interested me so much as . . . tracking down the clues, you know? Like a kind of detective story. Coming across that book no one else had bothered to read; it was the first time I’d seen the fun of independent research.”

“He wanted you to expand your paper into an honors project. But before you even got started, bang! Joe Davitch hove into view.”

“Oh, well.”

“And poor Will Allenby; poor Will,” her mother said, making a sudden right-angle turn. “He never even knew what hit him! One day you two were as good as engaged, and the next day you’d married a man nobody knew from Adam.”

“It wasn’t the next
day,
” Rebecca said. “It wasn’t quite as sudden as that.”

“It was as far as anybody hereabouts could tell.”

Fair enough, Rebecca supposed. It was true that she had kept Joe a secret. But at the start it had seemed so innocent—just a casual visit when he happened to be passing through Macadam. (Though if it had really been that casual, why had she not mentioned it to Will?) He had taken her for a sandwich at a diner just off campus, entertained her with a couple of funny stories about his work. The party the evening before, he said, had been a wedding reception where the bridal couple’s mothers had nearly come to blows. “We all know perfectly well,” the groom’s mother had shouted, “why your daughter is getting married in a dress with an umpire waistline!” Rebecca had laughed, and Joe had sat back and watched her with a fond, considering smile that made her wonder, suddenly, whether they already knew each other from some earlier time in her life that she had simply forgotten. But no, she surely would have remembered this larger-than-life man with the complicated upper lip that reminded her of a cursive letter M. “You were laughing the first night I saw you, too,” he told her. “You were enjoying the party more than anyone else in the room.”

She didn’t contradict him.

Everything might have turned out differently if she had.

He said he had started the Open Arms in 1951, when he’d left college for financial reasons after his father—an ironically uninsured insurance agent—had died without warning. “So is that . . . what you
do
?” Rebecca asked him. “I mean, is that your whole profession?”

“Yes, there you have it,” he said. “Nothing in my life but parties, parties, parties.”

She glanced at him, thinking she had detected a certain edge in his voice. But then he went on to give a very amusing account of a christening celebration where a child had dropped the baby into the punch bowl, and she decided she’d been imagining things.

She did tell him about Will Allenby. Or she alluded to him, at least: she said, “my date and I,” when discussing a movie she’d seen. Granted, she didn’t use the term
boyfriend
. But that would have been sort of tactless, wouldn’t it? Sort of bragging and inconsiderate.

Will Allenby was long-boned and slender and self-contained, with a cloud of yellow curls and an expression of luminous sweetness. He attended Macadam too—certainly not by coincidence—and they were planning to marry as soon as they graduated. This was in the 1960s, when half their classmates seemed to be sleeping with the other half, but they themselves were waiting till after their wedding. At the end of every evening, they kissed and kissed and kissed, clinging to each other, trembling, but then they parted company—Will to go off to his dorm, Rebecca to hers. “Au revoir,” Will always said, because using the word
goodbye,
he claimed, would make him too sad. Rebecca found this incredibly romantic, especially when he remembered to gargle that first
r
the way the French did.

None of this came up in her conversation with Joe at the diner, however, or in any of their other conversations. For there
were
other conversations. He telephoned two days later to solicit her advice about a Sweet Sixteen party. Rebecca had never been Sweet Sixteen herself (she’d been sixteen-going-on-forty, she felt), but nobody would have guessed it from her flood of helpful suggestions. And when he dropped by the following week on his way to a linen outlet, although Macadam wasn’t really on his way at all, wouldn’t her friends have been surprised to see how readily she slid into his car to accompany him, and how authoritatively she coached him on his selection of cocktail napkins, embroidered guest towels, and stenciled table runners!

“I find myself in Macadam” became his regular excuse, although Macadam was nearly an hour’s drive from Baltimore, over near D.C. “I find myself in Macadam and I wondered if you’d like to . . .” Grab a cup of coffee. Hunt a book in the college bookstore. Help select new stemware. In the course of three weeks he visited seven times, and after every visit, her first act was to return to her room and check her own face in the mirror. Her pink cheeks and her shining eyes, still a bit damp from laughter, and her heavy crown of braids. Was this how Joe Davitch saw her?

She spent an hour, once, doodling what looked like birds in flight—those shorthand double tildes that children fill the skies of their drawings with—before she admitted to herself that she was trying to capture the shape of his upper lip.