Back When We Were Grownups (29 page)

“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

A
s 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.

Rebecca’s mother and Aunt Ida had accepted, much to Rebecca’s surprise, with the understanding that they would leave the party early on account of the long drive home. Also they would arrive early, they announced, in order to help out. Privately, Rebecca began thinking up tasks that would keep them harmlessly occupied. Sorting through the napkins, inspecting the stemware for water spots . . .

Because it was December, the decorating scheme would be Christmassy. Already a slender tree stood in the front-parlor window, diminutive white lights twinkling tastefully from each branch. Now Rebecca set up another tree in the dining room, chunkier and messier, smothered in decades’ worth of construction-paper chains and Polaroid photos of the children pasted on paper-doily snowflakes. Some of the photos were faded past recognition. Many were interchangeable, since Davitch babies tended to look fairly much alike below a certain age. (All those little clock faces, wisps of dark hair, squinty mistrustful eyes.) On top she put a gold foil star with seven different-sized, unevenly spaced points, brought home from kindergarten long ago by one or another of the girls; no one knew which anymore. She draped a huge banner across the rear-parlor mantel reading
HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY POOPY
—a mistake she hadn’t noticed until she got it home—and she lugged the TV and the VCR down from the family room and plugged them into an outlet in the front parlor, because Hakim (in love with Western technology, like every immigrant Rebecca had ever known) was bringing as his present a professionally produced videotape assembled from the family’s home movies. This was supposed to be a secret, although Poppy had to have suspected something. On the morning of the party, when he went in to watch cartoons, all he found was a rectangle of dust on the TV stand. He didn’t say a word about it, though; just grunted and laid out a game of solitaire instead.

The day was bright and unusually cold, which meant Rebecca could wear her Bedouin costume. Although of course she didn’t put it on first thing. No, first she put on baggy pants and one of Joe’s old flannel shirts, and she raced around the house picking up and vacuuming and cooking Poppy a special breakfast. Nothing but sweets—waffles and cocoa. (The man would contract diabetes before the end of the day.) A little blue birthday candle flickered on the topmost waffle. “
Happy birthday to you . . .
” she sang, all by herself, standing over the table with her hands clasped together in front of her.

Poppy said, “Why, thank you, Beck,” and calmly blew out the candle. It amused and touched and exasperated her, all at the same time, how he accepted this fuss and bother as only his due.

“Just think,” she told him. “One hundred years ago today, you were just the tiniest bundle nestled in a cradle. Or maybe in your mother’s bed. Were you born at home? Did your mother have a doctor?”

“She had a midwife,” he said, cutting into his waffles. “Mrs. Bentham: she came to the house. We lived on North Avenue then. She was just starting out in her practice, and we were her first set of twins.”

“Oh, yes, twins,” Rebecca said. “I’d forgotten that.” Briefly, she laid a hand on his arm. “It must make you sad, celebrating your birthday without your brother here to share it.”

“No, not really,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ve had a lot of years to get used to it.”

He took a much too large mouthful of waffles, dotting his mustache with beads of syrup. He was wearing his red plaid bathrobe over striped pajamas. Bristly whiskers silvered his face, and his white hair stood on end, unbrushed, raying out like sunbeams.

“Eighteen ninety-nine,” Rebecca said. “I don’t even know who was President then!”

“Beats me.”

“Your family wouldn’t have had a car, I suppose, or a telephone . . .”

But he was pursuing another train of thought. He said, “I’ve wondered, from time to time, if I’ve had added onto my life all those years my brother didn’t get to use.”

He spoke as if his brother had had no choice—as if it hadn’t been his own decision not to use those years. Rebecca said, “Well, I imagine he would have been glad to see you enjoying them.”

“Not necessarily,” Poppy told her. “He always did believe I got the best of the deal.”

“How was that?”

“Oh, you know . . . he wasn’t a naturally happy person. Some people, they just have a harder time being happy.”

“Would you say Joe was naturally happy?”

Poppy took another bite of waffles, either considering her question or stalling.

“When I met him, he was laughing,” she prompted him. Then she recalled that in fact, she was the one who’d been laughing. But she continued. “He said, ‘I see you’re having a wonderful time.’ His very first words to me. Because Zeb was clowning around; you know how he does, and so I started . . . And when I decided to marry him,
then
he was laughing, for sure! I saw him laughing in the library window and I decided at that moment.”

Poppy said, “Hmm,” and blotted his mustache on his napkin.

“And don’t forget,” Rebecca said, “by profession, he was a party-giver.”

“But he never felt party-giving was really his true life,” Poppy reminded her.

“Well, no.”

“And that’s where he and I differed,” Poppy said. “Because I was always telling him, ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Face it,’ I said. ‘There
is
no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you’ve got,’ I said.”

“But he had a
fine
life!” Rebecca said.

“He certainly did.”

Poppy folded his napkin and laid it beside his plate. “So what I tell myself,” he said, “is I’m observing our birthday for both of us. That’s how I like to view it.”

Evidently, he had swerved back onto the subject of his twin brother. Rebecca took a second to realize it, though. That was what happened when you lived with someone confused: you became confused yourself, and one thing developed the oddest way of blurring into other things.

*  *  *

Her mother and her aunt arrived shortly before noon. Her mother wore her dressiest pants set and a fluffy mohair jacket that made her look smaller than ever. Her hair had been crimped into ridges as evenly spaced as the rows of tufts on a bedspread. Aunt Ida was all ruffles and froth—a pink rosebud print, despite the season—and she must have gone to the same hairdresser, although her curls were already beginning to wander out of formation. Between them they carried a large, flat package, beautifully wrapped and ribboned. “It’s a portrait of William McKinley,” Aunt Ida confided in a whisper.

“McKinley,” Rebecca said.

“He was who was President in 1899.”

“Oh, we were just discussing that at breakfast,” Rebecca said. “McKinley! Is that who it was!”

“We thought it would remind Mr. Davitch of his youth.”

“I’m sure he’ll love it,” Rebecca said. “Have you two had lunch yet?”

“Oh, we don’t want to be any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble. I’ve got some cold cuts set out.”

She placed their gift on the chest of drawers in the front parlor, and then she led them back to the kitchen. “Poppy’s upstairs napping,” she said. “He had a sandwich ahead of time and now he’s trying to rest before the party.”

“Law, he must be so excited,” Aunt Ida said, but Rebecca’s mother said, “I never did understand the notion of adults having birthday parties.”

“Well, it’s kind of our tradition,” Rebecca told her. “And besides, this is his hundredth! He could have had his name read out on TV, if we had asked.”

“
My
last birthday party was in 1927,” Rebecca’s mother said. “I was five years old.”

Aunt Ida said, “Oh, that can’t be right! What about when you turned eighteen and Mother gave you her pearls?”

“That wasn’t a party, though, Ida.”

“Well, you had a cake! With candles on it! If you don’t call that a party, I’d like to know what it was!”

“Have a seat,” Rebecca told them. “Who would like iced tea?”

“Oh, I would, darlin’, if it’s made,” Aunt Ida said.

It was. (Rebecca knew that they always drank iced tea with lunch, even in the dead of winter, although at suppertime they would turn it down for fear of not sleeping well.) She brought the pitcher from the refrigerator and set it on the table. Aunt Ida was forking a mountain of cold cuts onto her plate, selecting each slice daintily with her little finger quirked as if that would make her portion seem smaller. Rebecca’s mother was delivering a blow-by-blow account of their trip. “We took the old County Highway,” she said, “because you couldn’t pay me to drive on that I-95, all those truckers whizzing past blaring their horns at a person. I don’t think I told you about Abbie Field’s daughter having that awful accident on I-95 down near Richmond. She had gone to I think Heathsville, or Heathsburg, one of those places; was it Heathsville? Heathsburg? Went to visit her parents-in-law and was coming back on a Sunday after mass; her mother-in-law is Catholic, you know, one of those very devout Catholic widows, and she had invited Abbie to her ladies’ bridge club luncheon on Saturday and then—”

“Wait; that’s not possible,” Aunt Ida said.

“Beg pardon? Of course it’s possible. You can be a Catholic and still play bridge.”

“You said Abbie went to visit her parents-in-law. Plural. But that her mother-in-law was a widow.”

“All right; I misspoke. It’s not a capital crime.”

Rebecca said, “How’s the move coming, Mother?”

“What move?”

“Your move to the retirement home.”

“Oh, that. Well, I’m working on it, but first I have to sort my belongings.”

Aunt Ida sent Rebecca a look. “Have a deviled egg,” Rebecca told her.

“Why, thank you, hon. I really shouldn’t, on account of my cholesterol, but you know I can’t resist.”

“Folks tell me I should hire help,” Rebecca’s mother said. “I’m too old to do all that sorting on my own, they tell me. But you know how
that
works. When Ida here tried to clean out my desk, would you believe what she did? Threw away a perfectly good sheet of three-cent postage stamps.”

“Have a deviled egg, Mother,” Rebecca said.

Then the phone rang, and she cried, “Whoops!” and raced off to answer it, even though the kitchen extension was no more than a foot away from her.

*  *  *

Rebecca’s Bedouin costume was a long black woolen robe with broad vertical bands of purple, red, and turquoise running from shoulder to hem. It made her feel like Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra,
she had told the clerk at Discount Dashikis when she was trying it on. In order to keep the bright colors from blanching her features, she applied a good deal more makeup than usual. Then she wound a splashy purple-and-black silk sash around her head. When she descended the stairs, the sash wafted out behind her like a bridal train. “Goodness,” her mother said, meeting up with her in the foyer. Rebecca gave her a sphinxlike smile. (Nothing she would wear could make her mother happy.) But Aunt Ida, already seated in the front parlor, cried out, “Oh, my, don’t you look cheery!”

“Thank you,” Rebecca told her. In a majestically level, swift, flowing motion, she crossed to the hearth and bent for the butane torch hidden in the basket of pinecones at one side. She started lighting the candles she had set around the room—the Christmas candles and the Hanukkah candles and the all-occasion candles and even the pale egg-shaped candles ordinarily reserved for Easter.

“It’s a regular conflagration!” Aunt Ida said gaily.

Rebecca’s mother sat down in the rocker, first smoothing the back of her slacks beneath her as if she were wearing a skirt. “I laid out your cocktail napkins in a fan shape,” she told Rebecca. “I don’t know if that’s the way you wanted them. I straightened up some in the kitchen, and I took the liberty of watering that poor dead plant out back beside the steps.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

“You’ll find the leftover cold cuts on the top shelf in the fridge. I put them in one of those newspaper bags I found in the waxed-paper drawer, although I’m not entirely easy in my mind about letting foodstuffs come into contact with colored plastic.”

“I’m sure they’ll be finished off before the poison has time to take effect,” Rebecca told her.

The doorbell rang. Her mother said, “Mercy,” and checked her watch. “It’s three minutes before two! Who do you suppose that is?”