Ladder of Years (11 page)

“Good riddance,” Sam told her. “It’s only live pets that we’re not allowed.”

Sam had been out of sorts all day, it seemed to Delia.

So that first evening, when they should have been taking a stroll on the beach or walking into town for ice cream, the grown-ups sat in the kerosene-smelling, poorly lighted living room, reading tattered magazines left behind by earlier tenants and listening to the pecking of the rain against the windows. The twins were still in the kitchen, badgering Vernon. Susie and the boys had borrowed the Plymouth and driven to Ocean City, which made Delia anxious because she always pictured Ocean City as a gigantic arena of bumper cars manned by drunken college students. But she tried to keep her mind on
American Deck and Patio.

“If tomorrow isn’t sunny,” Linda said, “maybe we could take a little day trip out past Salisbury. I want the twins to get some sense of their heritage.”

“Oh, Linda, not that damn cemetery again,” Eliza said.

“Well, fine, then. Just lend me a car and I’ll take them myself. That’s what happened last year, as I recall.”

“Yes, and last year both twins came back bored to tears and cranky. What do they care for a bunch of dead Carrolls and Webers?”

“They had a wonderful time! And I’d like to find Great-Uncle Roscoe’s place too, if I can.”

“Well, good hunting, is all I can say. I’m sure it’s a parking lot by now, and anyhow, Mother never got along with Uncle Roscoe.”

“Eliza, why do you have to run me down at every turn?” Linda
demanded. “Why is it that every little thing I propose you have to mock and denigrate?”

“Now, ladies,” Sam said absently, leafing through
Offshore Angler.

Linda turned on him. She said, “Don’t you ’Now, ladies’
me
, Sam Grinstead.”

“Sorry,” Sam murmured.

“Mr. Voice of Reason, here!”

“My mistake.”

She rose in a huff and went off to check the twins. Eliza closed her
Yachting World
and stared bleakly at the cover.

Linda and Eliza were in their Day Two Mode, was how Delia always thought of it—that edgy, prickly stage after the first flush of Linda’s arrival had faded. Once, Delia had asked Eliza why she and Linda weren’t closer, and Eliza had said, “Oh, people who’ve shared an unhappy childhood rarely
are
close, I’ve found.” Delia was surprised. Their childhood had been unhappy? Hers had been idyllic. But she refrained from saying so.

Linda returned with the twins, who were still fretting over Vernon, and Sam set aside his magazine and suggested a game of rummy. “Did you bring the cards?” he asked Delia.

She had not. She realized it the instant he asked, but made a show of rooting through the shopping bag on the coffee table. Jigsaw puzzles, Monopoly, and a Parcheesi board emerged, but no cards. “Um …,” she said.

“Oh, well,” Sam said, “we’ll play Parcheesi, then.” His tone was weightily patient, which seemed worse than shouting.

At the bottom of the bag, Delia came across her current library book.
Captive of Clarion Castle
, it was called. She had started it last week and found it slow, but anything was preferable to deck plans. When Sam asked, “Are you playing too, Delia?” she said, “I think I’ll go read in bed.”

“Now? It’s not even nine o’clock.”

“Well, I’m tired,” she told him. She said good night to the others and walked out with the front of her book concealed, although no one made any attempt to see the title.

Upstairs, a new ribbon of water meandered from the sodden bath mat alongside the chimney. She ignored it and proceeded to the room she was sharing with Sam. It was small and musty-smelling, with one, uncurtained
window. For privacy’s sake she changed into her nightgown in the dark, and then she washed up in the bathroom across the hall. Back in the bedroom, she switched on the lamp and aimed its weak yellow beam in the direction of her pillow. Then she slid under the covers, wriggled her toes luxuriously, and opened her book.

The heroine of this book was a woman named Eleanora, which unfortunately brought Eleanor to Delia’s mind. Eleanora’s long raven tresses and “piquant” face kept giving way to Eleanor’s no-nonsense haircut and Iron Mama jawline; and when Kendall, the hero, crushed her to him, Delia saw Eleanor’s judging gaze directed past his broad shoulder. Kendall was Eleanora’s future brother-in-law, the younger brother of her aristocratic, suave fiancé. Impetuously, Kendall kidnapped Eleanora the first time he laid eyes on her, which happened to be about fifteen minutes before her wedding. “I will never love you! Never!” Eleanora cried, pummeling his chest with her tiny fists, but Kendall seized her wrists and waited, masterful and confident, until she subsided.

Delia closed the book, leaving one finger inside as a marker. She stared down at the couple embracing on the cover.

Not once, from the moment they met, had Adrian truly pursued her. It had all been a matter of happenstance. Happenstance had led him to ask her to pose as his girlfriend (Who else was remotely eligible? The woman with the baby? The old lady at the checkout counter?), and happenstance had brought them together again a few nights later. In addition, his every act had betrayed that he was still in love with his wife. He loved her so much that he couldn’t face her on his own in the supermarket; he couldn’t sleep in their bedroom after she left. But Delia, like some self-deluded teenage ninny, had chosen not to see.

And she had overlooked other clues as well—clues that revealed the very nature of his character. For instance, his behavior at that first encounter: his rearrangement of her shopping plans, his condescending reference to Roland Park names, his trendy groceries. He was not a
bad
person, surely, but his mind was on his own concerns. And he was just the least bit shallow.

In romance novels, this realization would have made her turn thankfully to the man who had been waiting in the wings all along. But in real life, when she heard Sam’s step on the stairs she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. She felt him standing over her, and then he
slipped her book from her hands and switched off the lamp and left the room.

By morning the rain had stopped and the sun was out, shining all the brighter in the washed-clean air. The whole family set off for the ocean shortly before noon—the grown-ups in Sam’s Buick, the younger ones in the Plymouth with Ramsay at the wheel. Scattered puddles hissed beneath their tires as they drove across Highway 1 and threaded past the higher-priced cottages, closer to the water. When the road dead-ended, they parked and fed two meters with quarters and unloaded the day’s supplies—the thermos jugs and blankets, towels, Styrofoam coolers, rafts, and beach bags. Delia carried a stack of towels, along with her straw tote stuffed so full of emergency provisions that the handles dug a furrow in her bare shoulder. She was wearing her pink gingham swimsuit with the eyelet-edged skirt, and navy canvas espadrilles, but no robe or cover-up, because she didn’t care
what
Sam said, she wanted to get at least a hint of a tan.

“Watch it, girls,” Linda told the twins as they lugged a cooler between them up the wooden walkway. “You’re letting the bottom drag.”

“It’s Thérèse’s fault—she’s making me do all the work!”

“Am not.”

“Are so.”

“Didn’t I tell you to take something lighter?” Linda asked them. “Didn’t I offer you the blankets, or the—”

But then they crested the low, sandy rise, and there was the ocean, reminding them what they had come all this way for. Oh, every year it seemed Delia forgot. That vast, slaty, limitless sweep, that fertile, rotting, dog’s-breath smell, that continual to-and-fro shushing that had been going on forever while she’d been elsewhere, stewing over trivia! She paused, letting her eyes take rest in the dapples of yellow sunlight that skated the water, and then Carroll’s armload of rafts crashed into her from behind, and he said, “Geez, Mom.”

“Oh, excuse me,” she said. She started down the wooden steps to the beach.

There were advantages to coming so early in the season. True, the water had not had time to warm up yet, but also the beach was less crowded. Blankets were spread at civilized intervals, with space between.
Only a few children splashed at the edge of the breakers, and Delia could easily count the heads that bobbed farther out.

She and Eliza unfolded a blanket and arranged themselves on it, while Sam worked an umbrella pole into the sand. Susie and the boys, however, walked a good twenty feet beyond before stopping to set up their own station. They had been keeping apart for several years now; it no longer hurt Delia’s feelings. But she did always notice.

“Now, you two are not stirring from here,” Linda told the twins, “until I get every inch of you covered with sunblock.” She held them close, one after the other, and slathered lotion on their skinny arms and legs. As soon as she let go of them, off they raced to the young people’s blanket.

Susie’s radio was playing “Under the Boardwalk,” which had always seemed to Delia a very lonesome song. In fact, “Under the Boardwalk” was rising from other radios as well, on other blankets, so that the Atlantic Ocean seemed to have acquired its own melancholy background music.

“Believe I’ll go for a jog,” Sam told Delia.

“Oh, Sam. You’re on vacation!”

“So?”

He shucked off his beach robe and adjusted the leather band of his watch. (The watch was evidently part of his new exercise routine; in just what way, Delia wasn’t sure.) Then he walked down to the surf, turned, and started loping northward, a lanky figure in beige trunks and gigantic white sneakers.

“At least here they have all these lifeguards who’ve been trained in CPR,” Delia told her sisters. She folded Sam’s robe and packed it away in her tote.

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Eliza said. “The doctors told him to jog.”

“Not to overdo, though!”

“To me he looks just the same as always,” Linda said. “If you consider that a good thing.” She was shading her forehead to gaze after him. “I never would have known he’d had a heart attack.”

“It wasn’t a heart attack! It was chest pains.”

“Whatever,” Linda said carelessly.

She was wearing a one-piece swimsuit held up by a center cord that encircled her neck. It made her breasts appear to droop at either side like a pair of weary eyes. Eliza, who scorned the notion of a whole separate outfit for one week of swimming per year, wore denim shorts and a black knit tank top rolled up beneath her bra.

Delia took off her shoes and dropped them into her tote. Then she lay down flat on her back, with the sun’s mild warmth soaking into her skin. Gradually sounds grew fainter, like remembered sounds—the voices of other sunbathers nearby, the high, sad cries of the seagulls, the music from the radios (Paul McCartney now, singing “Uncle Albert”), and under everything, so she almost stopped hearing it, the ocean’s rush, as constant and unvaried as the ocean inside a seashell.

She and Sam had come to this beach on their honeymoon. They had stayed at an inn downtown that no longer existed, and every morning, lying out here side by side with their bare, fuzzed arms just touching, they had reached such a state that, eventually, they had to rise and rush back to their room. Once even that had seemed too far, and they’d plunged into the ocean instead, out past the breakers, and she could still remember the layers of contrast—his warm, bony legs brushing hers beneath the cool, silky water—and the fishy scent of his wet face when they kissed. But the summer after that they had the baby with them (little Susie, two months old and fussy, fussy, fussy) and in later years the boys, and they had seldom managed even to stretch out on their blanket together, let alone steal back to their cottage. Eliza started coming too, and Linda before she married, and their father because he never could have kept house on his own; and Delia spent her days ankle-deep in the surf tending children, making sure they didn’t drown, admiring each new skill they mastered. “Watch this, Mom.” “No, watch
this
!” They used to think she was so important in their lives.

Someone’s feet passed in the sand with a sound like rubbing velvet, and she opened her eyes and sat up. For a moment she felt light-headed. “Your face is burning,” Eliza told her. “Better put some lotion on.” She herself was sitting sensibly in the shade of the umbrella. Linda was down in the surf, braced for an incoming wave with both plump arms outflung and her hands posed as liltingly as bird wings, and the twins had returned from the other blanket and were filling buckets near Delia. Damp sand caked Marie-Claire’s knees and made two circles on the empty-looking seat of Thérèse’s swimsuit.

“Did Sam get back from jogging?” Delia asked Eliza.

“Not yet. Want to go for a dip?”

Delia didn’t dignify that with an answer. (As everyone in her family well knew, the temperature had to be blistering, the ocean flat as glass, and not a sea nettle sighted all day before she would venture in.) Instead, she reached for her tote bag. Delving past espadrilles, Sam’s robe, and
her billfold, she came up with
Captive of Clarion Castle.
Eliza humphed when she saw the cover. “Guess I’ll leave you to your
literature
,” she told Delia. She got to her feet and set off, dusting the back of her shorts in a businesslike manner.

“Aunt Eliza, can we come too?” Marie-Claire shrilled.

“Wait for us, Aunt Liza!”

When they ran after her, they looked as skittery and high-bottomed as two little hermit crabs.

Eleanora was beginning to notice that Kendall was not the monster she had imagined. He brought trays of food to her locked tower room and let it be known he had cooked all the dishes himself. Eleanora pretended to be unimpressed, but later, after he left, she reflected on the incongruity of someone so brawny and virile stirring pots at a stove.

“Whew!” Sam said. He was back. Sweat trickled down the ridged bones of his chest, and he had the drawn, strained, gasping look that always distressed Delia after his runs. “Sam,” she said, setting aside her book, “you’re going to kill yourself! Sit here and rest.”