Ladder of Years (20 page)

Sam
   

He had made his first four corrections with the hyphen key—easy for Delia to read through—but the fifth was so thoroughly x-ed over that she couldn’t figure it out even when she held the letter up to the light. Well, no doubt that was for the best. It was probably something even more obtuse than his other remarks, and Lord knows those were obtuse enough.

Not invade her privacy! Just sit back and give up on her, as if she were a missing pet or mitten or dropped penny!

She might have known, she reflected. All this proved was how right she had been to leave.

Her teeth were chattering, and her new sweater was no help. Instead of eating her lunch, she slipped off her shoes and climbed into bed. She lay shivering beneath the one blanket, with her jaw set against the cold and her arms wrapped around her ribs, hugging her own self tightly.

9

No wonder she’d been unable to picture winter in Bay Borough! Underneath, she realized now, she had expected Sam to come fetch her long before then. She resembled those runaway children who never, no matter how far they travel, truly mean to leave home.

So anyhow. Here she was. And the entire rest of her life was stretching out empty before her.

She took to sitting on her bed in the evenings and staring into space. It was too much to say that she was thinking. She certainly had no conscious thoughts, or at any rate, none that mattered. Most often she was, oh, just watching the air, as she used to do when she was small. She used to gaze for hours at those multicolored specks that swarm in a room’s atmosphere. Then Linda had informed her they were dust motes. That took the pleasure out of it, somehow. Who cares about mere dust? But now she thought Linda was wrong. It was air she watched, an infinity of air endlessly rearranging itself, and the longer she watched the more soothed she felt, the more mesmerized, the more peaceful.

She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always known that her body was just a shell she lived in,
but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell—in which case, who was “she”? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing.

Often she didn’t begin the night’s reading till nine or nine-thirty, which meant she could no longer finish a novel in one sitting; so she switched to short stories instead. She would read a story, watch the air awhile, and read another. She would mark her page with a library slip and listen to the sounds from outdoors—the swish of cars, the chirring of insects, the voices of the children in the house across the street. On hot nights the older children slept on a second-floor porch, and they always talked among themselves until their parents intervened. “Am I going to have to
come upstairs?
” was their father’s direst threat. That would quiet them, but only for a minute.

Delia wondered if Sam knew that Carroll was scheduled for tennis lessons the middle two weeks in July. You couldn’t depend on Carroll to remember on his own. And did anyone recall that this was dentist month? Well, probably Eliza did. Without Eliza, Delia could never have left her family so easily.

She wasn’t sure if that was something to be thankful for.

The fact was, Delia was expendable. She was an extra. She had lived out her married life like a little girl playing house, and always there’d been a grown-up standing ready to take over—her sister or her husband or her father.

Logically, she should have found that a comfort. (She used to be so afraid of dying while her children were small.) But instead, she had suffered pangs of jealousy. Why was it Sam, for instance, that everybody turned to in times of crisis? He always got to be the reasonable one, the steady and reliable one; she was purely decorative. But how had that come about? Where had she been looking while that state of affairs developed?

She read another story, which contained several lengthy nature descriptions. She enjoyed nature as much as the next person, but you could carry it too far, she felt.

And was anybody keeping an eye on Sam’s health? He had that tendency, lately, to overdo the exercise. But,
It’s none of my concern
, Delia reminded herself. His letter had freed her. No more need to count cholesterol grams; pointless to note that the Gobble-Up carried fat-free mayonnaise.

She called back some of the letter’s phrases: You cannot have been
unaware
and
Nor am I entirely clear.
Bloodless phrases, emotionless phrases. She supposed the whole neighborhood knew he hadn’t married her for love.

Again she saw the three daughters arrayed on the couch—Sam’s memory, originally, but she seemed to have adopted it. She saw her father in his armchair and Sam in the Boston rocker. The two of them discussed a new arthritis drug while Delia sipped her sherry and slid glances toward Sam’s hands, reflecting on how skilled they looked, how doctorly and knowing. It might have been the unaccustomed sherry that made her feel so giddy.

Just a few scattered moments, she thought, have a way of summing up a person’s life. Just five or six tableaux that flip past again and again, like tarot cards constantly reshuffled and redealt. A patch of sunlight on a window seat where someone big was scrubbing Delia’s hands with a washcloth. A grade-school spelling bee where Eliza showed up unannounced and Delia saw her for an instant as a stranger. The gleam of Sam’s fair head against the molasses-dark wood of the rocker. Her father propped on two pillows, struggling to speak. And Delia walking south alongside the Atlantic Ocean.

In this last picture, she wore her gray secretary dress. (Not all such memories are absolutely accurate.) She wore the black leather shoes she had bought at Bassett Bros. The clothes were wrong, but the look was right—the firmness, the decisiveness. That was the image that bolstered her.

“Whenever I hear the word ‘summer,’” one of the three marriageable maidens announced (Eliza, of course), “I smell this sort of melting smell, this yellow, heated, melting smell.” And Linda chimed in, “Yes, that’s the way she is! Eliza can smell nutmeg day at the spice plant clear downtown! Also anger.” And Delia smiled at her sherry. “Ah,” Sam murmured thoughtfully. Did he guess their ulterior motives? That Eliza was trying to sound interesting, that Linda was pointing out Eliza’s queerness, that Delia was hoping to demonstrate the dimple in her right cheek?

The washcloth scrubbing her hands was as rough and warm as a mother cat’s tongue. The squat, unhappy-looking young woman approaching Miss Sutherland’s desk changed into Delia’s sister. “I wish …,” her father whispered, and his cracked lips seemed to tear apart rather than separate, and he turned his face away from her. The evening after he died, she went to bed with a sleeping pill. She was so susceptible to drugs that she seldom took even an aspirin, but she gratefully
swallowed the pill Sam gave her and slept through the night. Only it was more like
burrowing
through the night, tunneling through with some blunt, inadequate instrument like a soup spoon, and she woke in the morning muddled and tired and convinced that she had missed something. Now she thought what she had missed was her own grief. Why that rush toward forgetfulness? she asked herself. Why the hurry to leap past grief to the next stage?

She wondered what her father had been wishing for. She hadn’t been able to figure it out at the time, and maybe he had assumed she just didn’t care. Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She made no effort to stop them.

Didn’t it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking. One of life’s many ironies.

She reached for her store of toilet paper and blew her nose. She felt that something was loosening inside her, and she hoped she would go on crying all night.

In the house across the street, a child called, “Ma, Jerry’s kicking me.” But the voice was distant and dreamy, and the response was mild. “Now, Jerry …” Gradually, it seemed, the children were dropping off. Those who remained awake allowed longer pauses to stretch between their words, and spoke more and more languidly, until finally the house was silent and no one said anything more.

Independence Day had passed nearly unobserved in Bay Borough—no parades, no fireworks, nothing but a few red-white-and-blue store windows. Bay Day, however, was another matter. Bay Day marked the anniversary of George Pendle Bay’s famous dream. It was celebrated on the first Saturday in August, with a baseball game and a picnic in the town square. Delia knew all about it because Mr. Pomfret was chairman of the Recreation Committee. He had had her type a letter proposing they replace the baseball game with a sport that demanded less space—for instance, horseshoes. The square, he argued, was so small and so thickly treed. But Mayor Frick, who was the son and grandson of earlier mayors and evidently reigned supreme, wrote back to say that the baseball game was a “time-honored tradition” and should continue.

“Tradition!” Mr. Pomfret fumed. “Bill Frick wouldn’t know a tradition if it bit him in the rear end. Why, at the start it was always horseshoes. Then Ab Bennett came back from the minors with his tail between his legs, and Bill Frick Senior got up a baseball game to make him look good. But Ab doesn’t even play anymore! He’s too old. He runs the lemonade stand.”

Delia had no interest in Bay Day. She planned to spend the morning on errands and give the square a wide berth. But first she found everything closed, and then the peculiar weather (a fog as dense as oatmeal and almost palpably soft) lured her to keep walking, and by the time she reached the crowd she felt so safe in her cloak of mist that she joined in.

The four streets surrounding the square were blocked off and spread with picnic blankets. Food booths lined the sidewalks, and strolling vendors hawked pennants and balloons. Even this much, though, Delia had trouble making out, because of the fog. People approaching seemed to be materializing, their features assembling themselves at the very last instant. The effect was especially unsettling in the case of young boys on skateboards. Elated by the closed streets, they careened through the crowd recklessly, looming up entire and then dissolving. All sounds were muffled, cotton-padded, and yet eerily distinct. Even smells were more distinct: the scent of bergamot hung tentlike over two old ladies pouring tea from a thermos.

“Delia!” someone said.

Delia turned to see Belle Flint unfolding a striped canvas sand chair. She was wearing a vivid pink romper and an armload of bangle bracelets that jingled when she sat down. Delia hadn’t been sure till now that Belle remembered her name; so she reacted out of surprise. “Why, hello, Belle,” she said, and Belle said, “Do you know Vanessa?”

The woman she waved a hand toward was the young mother from the square. She was seated just beyond Belle on a bedspread the same color as the fog, with her toddler between her knees. “Have some of my spread,” she told Delia.

“Oh, thanks, but—” Delia said. And then she said, “Yes, maybe I will,” and she went over to sit next to her.

“Get a load of the picnic lunches,” Belle told Delia. “It’s some kind of contest; they ought to give prizes. What did you bring?”

“Well, nothing,” Delia said.

“A woman after my own heart,” Belle said, and then she leaned closer
to whisper, “Selma Frick’s brought assorted hors d’oeuvres in stacked bamboo baskets. Polly Pomfret’s brought whole fresh artichokes on a bed of curried crayfish.”

“Me, I’m with the teenagers,” Vanessa said, handing her son an animal cracker. “I grab something from a booth whenever I get hungry.”

She reminded Delia of those girl-next-door movie stars from the 1940s, slim and dark and pretty in a white blouse and flared red shorts, with shoulder-length black hair and bright-red lipstick. Her son was overdressed, Delia thought—typical for a first child. In his corduroys and long-sleeved shirt, he looked cross and squirmy, and for good reason; Delia could feel the heat of the pavement rising through the bedspread.

“How old is your little boy?” she asked Vanessa.

“Eighteen months last Wednesday.”

Eighteen months! Delia could have said. Why, she remembered that age. When Ramsay was eighteen months, he used to … and Susie, that was when Susie learned to …

Such a temptation, it was, to prove her claims to membership—the labor pains, the teething, the time when she too could have told her baby’s age to the day. But she resisted. She merely smiled at the child’s shimmer of blond hair and said, “I suppose he gets his coloring from his father.”

“Most likely,” Vanessa said carelessly.

“Vanessa’s a single parent,” Belle told Delia.

“Oh!”

“I have no idea who Greggie’s father might be,” Vanessa said, wiping her son’s mouth with a tissue. “Or rather, I have a few ideas, but I could never narrow it down to just one.”

“Oh, I see,” Delia said, and she turned quickly toward the ball game.

Not that there was much to look at, in the fog. Apparently home plate lay in the southeast corner. It was from there she heard the plock! of a hit. But all she could discern was second base, which was marked by a park bench. While she watched, a runner loped up to settle on the bench, and the player already seated there rose and caught a ball out of nowhere and threw it back into the mist. Then he sat down again. The runner leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and stared intently toward home plate, although how he hoped to see that far Delia couldn’t imagine.

“Derek Ames,” Belle informed her. “One of our best hitters.”

Delia said, “I would think the statue would get in the way.”

“Oh, George plays shortstop,” Belle said, giggling. “No, seriously: there’s a rule. Bean the statue and you walk to first. It used to count as an automatic run till Rick Rackley moved here. But you know professional athletes: they excel at
any
sport. It got so every time Rick came to bat, he laid old Georgie low.”