Back When We Were Grownups (14 page)

“Poppy,” she called. “Wait.” He paused, lips still parted, and turned so blindly in her direction that it stabbed her heart. She threaded her way through the crowd and came up and hugged his nearest arm to her breast. “A toast to NoNo and Barry,” she whispered into his tufted ear. “Long life and happiness.”

“Eh?” he mumbled. “Oh.” He turned to the others. “Long life and happiness,” he echoed. Then he seemed to collect himself, and in a stronger voice he added, “May your marriage be as happy as Joyce’s and mine was!”

Everybody clapped, and Rebecca squeezed his arm tighter and kissed his cheek.

“I got a little mixed up,” he told her as she helped him sit down. “But it was just for a second, there. I don’t think anyone noticed.”

“Not a soul,” she assured him. “Can I bring you a piece of cake?”

“I believe it was hearing the vows that took me back,” he said. “Seems like only yesterday
I
was saying those vows.”

“I know, Poppy.”

“People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,” he said. “The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it’s like missing water. Every day, you notice the person’s absence more.”

“I know.”

“But I surely never meant to spoil NoNo’s wedding.”

“You didn’t spoil it! You were fine,” Rebecca said. She caught a waiter’s attention and beckoned him over. “Look,” she told Poppy, lifting a plate of cake from the tray. “Fondant icing! Your favorite.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, brightening.

The photographer—just a college boy, a friend of Dixon’s—snapped Poppy’s photo as he raised the first forkful to his mouth. “I
think
I got that,” he told Rebecca.

Then Zeb came up and invited her to dance. The stereo was playing “Band of Gold.” “Where did
that
come from?” she asked as she stepped into his arms.

“It’s one of those 1950s collections,” he said. “Looked like good slow-dance music.” He steered her into Min Foo by accident and murmured, “Sorry.” Min Foo was so pregnant by now that Hakim had to hold her practically at arm’s length, leaning across her belly to set his cheek against hers. It made Rebecca laugh. Zeb drew back to smile at her. “You’re having fun, aren’t you,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “I am.”

In fact she might have been tipsy, because everything made her laugh, after that. She laughed when Tina waltzed by clinging firmly to Peter, who wore the shocked, frozen look of a hijacking victim. She laughed when Alice Farmer, whose church forbade dancing, started swaying her head to the beat so enthusiastically that her feathers must be setting up a breeze. She laughed when “Band of Gold” switched abruptly to “Sixteen Tons” and everyone came to a stop and looked helplessly at everyone else. Then Dixon’s friend herded them outside for a huge group photograph. “Could the people not related by blood get over on the left end?” he asked. “Just in case, you know. Because I’m not absolutely sure I can fit you all into the picture.”

“How ingenious: a pre-cropped photo,” Zeb murmured, and Rebecca laughed till her cheeks ached.

Yes, she had to admit that the wedding went much better than she had expected.

*  *  *

Alone in her room, with everyone else in the house fast asleep and the champagne giving her courage, she sat on the edge of the bed and dialed Will Allenby’s home number.

The phone at the other end rang twice and then gave a click. “Dr. Allenby,” a man said. A man; not a boy. He had the worn, slightly furry voice of somebody middle-aged. She recognized the Church Valley accent, though, that turned
Allenby
into
Allen-bih
.

“Will?” she said.

“Laura?”

“Who?”

There was a sharp silence, during which she longed to hang up. But finally she said, “This is Rebecca Holmes Davitch, Will. Do you remember me?”

“Rebecca?”

She waited.

“Rebecca,” he said dully.

“I hope you weren’t asleep!”

“No . . .”

“Just tell me if you were! I know it’s late!”

It seemed she could not get rid of this insanely manic tone. She grimaced to herself. “In fact,” she said, “maybe I should call another time. Yes, why don’t I do that? Okay! Bye!”

She hung up and doubled over, burying her face in her lap. It felt to her as if something in her chest had started bleeding.

Five

T
he house had a post-wedding atmosphere: crumbs ground into the carpet, paper napkins splotching the grass, soiled white satin ribbons drooping listlessly from the mantel. Peter returned to his room after breakfast and shut the door and remained there. Tina left for the airport with a skeleton crew of luggage bearers, her hair a sickly pink in the morning light. Alice Farmer washed stemware so silently and morosely that she might have been hung over, except that she didn’t drink.

The telephone kept ringing in a jarring way, and each time Rebecca answered, the cold, smooth weight of the receiver brought back last night’s call to Will. She felt battered and damaged and mortified. It was all that she could do not to hang up in mid-conversation.

“. . . only thinking of the baby,” Patch was saying at the other end of the line. “It’s not
my
fault Min Foo’s so sensitive. I just mentioned it for the baby’s sake.”

Mentioned what? Rebecca had lost track.

“Face it: Fatima’s a terrible name! And has anybody considered what they’d be bound to call her for short?”

Rebecca caught sight of what seemed to be a wine stain on the Redial button. Focusing her eyes required a great amount of effort, she noticed.

“Beck? Are you there? Did you hear me?”

“Yes, well . . . maybe it will be a boy,” Rebecca said.

“NoNo has decided it’s a girl,” Patch told her. “Min Foo’s not even considering boys’ names anymore, which is very shortsighted in my opinion because NoNo isn’t half as clairvoyant as she thinks she is.”

Rebecca started kneading her forehead.

“Otherwise, why would she marry a man like Barry Sanborn?”

“This all seems so pointless,” Rebecca said after a pause.

“Well, pardon
me,
” Patch snapped, and she slammed down the receiver.

Rebecca wondered where Patch found the energy for so much indignation.

At noon she set out leftovers and called Poppy and Peter to lunch. It wasn’t a sociable meal. Poppy kept stealing glances at a magazine lying open beside his plate. Peter concentrated on his food, peeling every last strip of fat from his ham and separating the carrot shreds from his salad before he ate it.

Then Poppy went off for his nap, but when Peter started toward the stairs Rebecca slung an arm around his shoulders, even though it meant she practically had to body-block him first. “How about you and me going out for ice cream?” she asked. “Get ourselves a little fresh air.”

“No, thanks,” he said, standing limp within her embrace.

“Want me to phone Patch? See if she can bring Danny over?”

“No, thanks.”

“Or a game, then. Some kind of board game.”

She saw him prepare to say no again, but she pressed on. “Monopoly? Checkers? Clue? We don’t want to tell your dad you didn’t do one thing all the while he was gone, do we?”

Peter said, “I don’t care.”

“He would blame
me
. He’d think I wasn’t a good—” She started to say “baby-sitter” but changed it at the last minute. “Wasn’t a good hostess! I kept you locked in your room on bread and water his whole entire honeymoon!”

A faint smile thinned Peter’s lips, but he said nothing.

Oh, Lord, she thought, life was so wearing. Still, she forced herself to persist. “Scrabble? Parcheesi?” she asked, giving his shoulders a squeeze. “We’ve got them all!”

“Well, Scrabble, maybe,” he said finally.

“Scrabble. Oh, you’ll regret this, young man. It so happens I’m the world champion of Scrabble.”

So they went upstairs to the family room, Rebecca chortling and rubbing her hands together and making a general fool of herself, and settled on the couch with the Scrabble board between them. Peter remained fairly quiet, but he did seem interested once things got under way. He turned out to be the type who took the game very seriously—less from any competitive spirit, she surmised, than because he was a perfectionist. He would peer at the board for minutes on end, reach toward his tiles but draw back, frown and say, “Hmm,” consult the dictionary and shake his head and return to his study of the board. This suited Rebecca just fine. She could brood to her heart’s content.

Who was this Laura person? What was she to Will?

“Guess this is about as much as I can do,” Peter said. He set an
oxy
in front of
moron,
which earned him sixty points because of a triple-word square.

Rebecca said, “Heavens.” Even allowing for his looking it up in the dictionary, she was impressed. Peter just shrugged and reached for the scorepad. He was wearing a polo shirt—long-sleeved! in this heat!—tucked conscientiously into his shorts, which looked like two bunchy skirts above his skinny legs. The poor child was such a waif, Rebecca thought. She sent him a sudden smile, one that she really meant, and he surprised her by smiling back before he wrote his score down.

While she was debating her own choice of words—none of them half as clever as Peter’s—Poppy wandered in from his nap. He still had his magazine, which he dangled at his side with one finger marking a page. “You remember NoNo’s wedding cake,” he said, standing over the Scrabble board.

“I remember,” Rebecca said.

“You know how it kind of tilted.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t feel that cakes are Biddy’s strong point.”

“No, I guess they’re not,” Rebecca said.

“So do you think it would hurt her feelings if somebody else made my birthday cake?”

“Not in the least, I’m sure,” she said, although in fact she wasn’t sure at all.

He wandered out again with his magazine—
Hospitality Monthly,
she saw. She sighed and set down an
N
and an
O
to spell
nor.
“Sorry, it’s all I could come up with,” she told Peter. “I wish I hadn’t promised Poppy this party. He’ll forget it before the balloons have shriveled; maybe the instant it’s over.”

She watched Peter total her score. His nails were so deeply bitten that the fingertips gripping the pen resembled little pink erasers.

“Last Monday,” she said, “he nagged me all afternoon to take him to see his friend Mr. Ames, and I kept saying, ‘I took you this morning, Poppy, remember? You’ve been, already; you brought him a scratch-off lottery ticket. You and he sat on his porch while I went grocery-shopping.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, yes, my mistake,’ but then not ten minutes later he’d start nagging me again.”

Peter set the scorepad aside. “He could enjoy the party while it was happening, though,” he said. “Even if he did forget it later.”

“Yes, well . . .” She thought that over. “I guess I want points,” she told him. And then, when she saw his puzzled glance toward the game board: “Points for giving the party, I mean. I want him to credit me afterwards for doing it.”

He said, “Oh,” and went back to his rack of tiles.

“As for the cake,” she said, “I think botched cakes are a Davitch tradition. You should have seen
my
wedding cake! Mother Davitch didn’t bake it long enough and it was all soupy in the middle. The bride figurine on top fell into this sort of sinkhole, waist deep.”

Peter moved a letter from the middle of his rack to the end. A
Z,
she couldn’t help seeing. The lucky devil.

The bride had been ivory plastic, she recalled, with a pinpoint-sized dot of red lipstick and two little beady brown eyes. A matte black, scallop-edged hairdo had been painted onto her head. And the groom had been blue-eyed and blond—nothing at all like Joe.

The telephone rang. She reached for the receiver. “Hello,” she said.

“Ah, may I speak to Rebecca, please.”

She grew extremely still.

The furred voice, the Church Valley accent. The leisurely, drawn-out vowels, with
I
sounding not much different from
Ah
.

“This is Rebecca,” she said.

“Um, Rebecca, this is Will Allenby.”

“Will! How did you find out my number?”

“I looked at my Caller ID.”

That Will had Caller ID was a shock. It seemed she had been picturing him still living in the sixties.

“You hung up on me so fast,” he was saying. “Thank goodness for modern inventions, I guess.”

What did he want, anyhow? Why had he called her back?

It made things all the eerier that he said, at that very moment, “So. What did you call me for?”

“Oh, I . . .” She smoothed her skirt across her lap with her free hand. “I happened to be at home,” she said, “home in Church Valley, I mean, and Mother and I got to talking about old times and I don’t know, I just all at once thought, I wonder where Will ever got to!”

“Not so very far, as you can see,” he said. He gave a short laugh. “I’m right here where you left me.” Then he hastened to say, “Where we went to college, that is. Well, I haven’t been here the whole time. I did go away for my doctorate. But now I teach at Macadam.”

“That’s wonderful, Will.”

“In fact, I’m head of my department.”

“Congratulations.”

“Yes, I can’t complain. Can’t complain at all. Really I’ve done very well. Been very fortunate.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

“Last year they nearly made me a dean, except they decided in the end that they ought to bring in an outsider.”

“Isn’t that nice,” she said. “And are you . . . do you . . . I mean, I suppose you must be married, and all.”

“Well, I used to be.”

“Oh.”

“I married an ex-student of mine. An English major; beautiful girl. She was once even offered a modeling job, although of course she didn’t accept it.”

“I see.”

“But we’re, um, divorced, at present.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, feeling a quick surge of pleasure.

“Don’t be sorry! Really! I’m doing just fine. Getting along just dandy.”

Had he always phrased things so stuffily? She couldn’t tell if it was his age or his natural manner; she had forgotten now how he had spoken when he was young.

“And what about you?” he was asking. “I know
you’re
married, right?”

“I’m a widow.”

“A widow,” he said slowly.

He seemed so unfamiliar with the word, she wondered for an instant whether she had made it up. It did sound peculiar, suddenly—almost African. (Or was that just because it reminded her of that song, “Wimoweh,” that the Weavers used to sing?)

“Well, please allow me to offer my condolences,” he was saying.

“Thank you.”

“Was this . . . ah, something recent?”

“No, my husband died a long time ago,” she told him.

The phrase “my husband” struck her all at once as tactless. She rushed on, so as to make it less noticeable. “I’d only been married six years,” she said. “I was left with four little girls—his three and one of my own.”

Peter glanced up from the board, just then, where he was laying out something that seemed to interconnect with almost every existing word. He gave her an oddly searching look, as if what she had said was new to him.

“That must have been hard,” Will was saying on the phone.

She gripped the receiver more tightly and asked, “Would you like to get together, ever?”

Oops. Too sudden. Too direct, too pushy; she could tell by his hesitation.

“Or else not,” she said. “I mean, I realize you must lead a very busy life.”

“Well, not
inordinately
busy . . .”

“So, then, maybe we should get together and catch up! I’m just over in Baltimore, you know.”

He said nothing. She plowed on. “Would you like to, say, meet someplace? Meet for a drink?”

“I’m afraid I’m not much of a drinker,” he said.

He didn’t drink at all, was what he meant. Church Valley people didn’t, by and large. She gave it one last try. She said, “Or maybe a bite to eat; how about it?”

“A bite to eat,” he said thoughtfully.

“I could come to Macadam, if you like.”

“Well, that’s a possibility.”

Something about the lingering way he said it—his ostentatious reluctance—made her more confident. She saw now that as the injured party, he required wooing. And sure enough, his next words were, “I do happen to be free this evening.”

“This evening? Oh, I’m sorry; this evening I have an . . . event.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow I have a tea-dance,” she told him. “And something Sunday, too, I’m afraid, but Monday’s good! Monday would be perfect!”

He waited a beat before he said, “All right, then. Monday.”

Maybe if she phoned right now, she could get a hair appointment Monday morning. Maybe she could buy a new dress; maybe even lose a little weight. She said, “What’s a good place? Do you still like Myrtle’s?”

“Myrtle’s?”

“Myrtle’s Family Restaurant?”

“Oh, Myrtle’s is long gone. I’d forgotten about Myrtle’s,” he said. “But I believe there’s something catty-corner from where Myrtle’s used to be. The Oak Tree, the Elm Tree—some such name. I don’t know how good it is, though. I’ve never eaten there.”

“Well, at least I’ll be able to find it,” she told him. “Shall we say seven o’clock?”

“Seven o’clock. All right.”

She said, “I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Well, fine,” he said.

He didn’t say that
he
was looking forward to it.

When she had hung up, she let out a long breath. “That was my very first boyfriend,” she told Peter.

He raised his eyes again from the Scrabble board.

“My only boyfriend, not counting Joe Davitch,” she said.

Then she plopped down two tiles to make another three-point word, and she didn’t even apologize.

*  *  *

Saturday morning she dropped Peter off at Patch’s house, after which she drove to a giant shopping mall. She forged grimly through each clothing store fingering fabrics, holding dresses under her chin in front of mirrors, and twice even trying things on. It appeared that without her noticing, the fashion world had been edging back toward the skimpy styles of the seventies. All she found were off-the-shoulder necklines, tight cap sleeves, and skirts that showed her underwear seams. In the mirrors she looked sweaty and unhappy. By noon she was still empty-handed, and she couldn’t spend any more time because the dining-room ceiling at home had dropped another chunk of plaster and Rick Saccone had agreed to come fix it before the tea-dance.