Ladder of Years (3 page)

Delia was astonished at his powers of observation. She watched him arrange his bags in her trunk, after which he consumed a good half minute repositioning a small box of something. Orzo, it was—a most peculiar, tiny-sized pasta that she’d often noticed on the shelf but never bought. She had thought it resembled rice, in which case why not serve
rice instead, which was surely more nutritious? She handed him the bag she was holding, and he settled that with elaborate care between the first two. “Are they coming out yet?” he asked.

“No,” she said, looking past him toward the store. “Listen, I owe you some money.”

“My treat.”

“No, really, I have to pay you back. Only I planned to write a check and I don’t have any cash. Would you accept a check? I could show you my driver’s license,” she said.

He laughed.

“I’m serious,” she told him. “If you don’t mind taking a—”

Then she caught sight of Skipper and Rosemary emerging from the supermarket. Skipper hugged a single brown paper bag. Rosemary carried nothing but a purse the size of a sandwich, on a glittery golden chain.

“Is it them?” Adrian asked.

“It’s them.”

He bent inside her trunk and started rearranging groceries again. “Tell me when they’re gone,” he said.

The couple crossed to a low red sports car. Rosemary was at least Skipper’s height if not taller, and she had the slouching, indifferent gait of a runway model. If she had walked into a wall, her hipbones would have hit first.

“Are they looking our way?” Adrian asked.

“I don’t think they see us.”

Skipper opened the passenger door, and Rosemary folded herself out of sight. He handed in the sack of groceries and shut the door, strode to the driver’s side, slid in and started the engine. Only then did he shut his own door. With a tightly knit, snarling sound, the little car spun around and buzzed off.

“They’re gone,” Delia said.

Adrian closed the trunk lid. He seemed older now. For the first time, Delia saw the fragile lines etched at the corners of his mouth.

“Well,” he said sadly.

It seemed crass to mention money again, but she had to say, “About the check …”

“Please. I owe
you
,” he said. “I owe you more than that. Thanks for going along with me on this.”

“It was nothing,” she told him. “I just wish there’d been, oh, somebody really appropriate.”

“Appropriate?”

“Somebody …
you
know,” she said. “As glamorous as your wife.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked. “Why, you’re very pretty! You have such a little face, like a flower.”

She felt herself blushing. He must have thought she was fishing for compliments. “Anyhow, I’m glad I could help out,” she said. She backed away from him and opened her car door. “Bye, now!”

“Goodbye,” he said. “Thanks again.”

As if he had been her host, he went on standing there while she maneuvered out of the parking slot. Naturally she made a mess of it, knowing he was watching. She cut her wheel too sharply, and the power-steering belt gave an embarrassing screech. But finally the car was free and she rolled away. Her rearview mirror showed Adrian lifting a palm in farewell, holding it steady until she turned south at the light.

Halfway home, she had a sudden realization: she should have given him the groceries he had picked out. Good heavens—all that pasta, those little grains of orzo, and now she remembered his consommé too. Consommé madrilene: she wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it. She was driving away with property that belonged to someone else, and it was shameful how pleased she felt, and how lucky, and how rich.

2

The trouble with plastic bags was, those convenient handles tempted you to carry too many at once. Delia had forgotten that. She remembered halfway across her front yard, when the crooks of her fingers began to ache. She hadn’t been able to bring the car around to the rear because someone’s station wagon was blocking the driveway. Nailed to the trunk of the largest oak was a rusty metal sign directing patients to park on the street, but people tended to ignore it.

She circled the front porch and picked her way through the scribble of spent forsythia bushes at the side. This was a large house but shabby, its brown shingles streaked with mildew and its shutters snaggletoothed where the louvers had fallen out over the years. Delia had never lived anywhere else. Neither had her father, for that matter. Her mother, an import from the Eastern Shore, had died of kidney failure before Delia could remember, leaving her in the care of her father and her two older sisters. Delia had played hopscotch on the parquet squares in the hall while her father doctored his patients in the glassed-in porch off the kitchen, and she had married his assistant beneath the sprawling brass chandelier that reminded her to this day of a daddy longlegs. Even after the wedding she had not moved away but simply installed her husband among her sweet-sixteen bedroom furniture, and once her children were
born it was not uncommon for a patient to wander out of the waiting room calling, “Delia? Where are you, darlin’? Just wanted to see how those precious little babies were getting along.”

The cat was perched on the back stoop, meowing at her reproachfully. His short gray fur was flattened here and there by drops of water. “Didn’t I tell you?” Delia scolded as she let him in. “Didn’t I warn you the grass would still be wet?” Her shoes were soaked just from crossing the lawn, the thin soles cold and papery-feeling. She stepped out of them as soon as she entered the kitchen. “Well, hi there!” she said to her son. He sat slumped over the table in his pajamas, buttering a piece of toast. She placed her bags on the counter and said, “Fancy finding you awake so early!”

“It’s not like I had any choice,” he told her glumly.

He was her youngest child and the one who most resembled her, she had always thought (with his hair the light-brown color and frazzled texture of binder’s twine, his freckled white face shadowed violet beneath the eyes), but last month he had turned fifteen, and all at once she saw more of Sam in him. He had shot up to nearly six feet, and his pointy chin had suddenly squared, and his hands had grown muscular and disconcertingly competent-looking. Even the way he held his butter knife suggested some new authority.

His voice was Sam’s too: deep but fine-grained, not subject to the cracks and creaks his brother had gone through. “I hope you bought cornflakes,” he told her.

“Why, no, I—”

“Aw, Mom!”

“But wait till you hear why I didn’t,” she said. “The funniest thing, Carroll! This real adventure. I was standing in the produce section, minding my own business—”

“There’s not one decent thing in this house to eat.”

“Well, you don’t usually want breakfast on a Saturday.”

He scowled at her. “Try telling Ramsay that,” he said.

“Ramsay?”

“He’s the one who woke me. Came stumbling into the room in broad daylight, out all night with his lady friend. No way could I get back to sleep after that.”

Delia turned her attention to the grocery bags. (She knew where this conversation was headed.) She started rummaging through them as if the cornflakes might emerge after all. “But let me tell you my adventure,”
she said over her shoulder. “Out of the blue, this man is standing next to me. … Good-looking? He looked like my very first sweetheart, Will Britt. I don’t believe I ever mentioned Will to you.”

“Mom,” Carroll said. “When are you going to let me move across the hall?”

“Oh, Carroll.”

“Nobody else I know has to room with their brother.”

“Now, now. Plenty of people in this world have to room with whole families,” she told him.

“Not with their boozehead college-boy brother, though. Not when there’s another room, perfectly empty, right across the hall.”

Delia set down the box of orzo and faced him squarely. She noticed that he needed a haircut, but this was not the moment to point that out. “Carroll, I’m sorry,” she said, “but I am just not ready.”

“Aunt Eliza’s ready! Why aren’t you? Aunt Liza was Grandpa’s daughter too, and she says of course I should have his room. She doesn’t understand what’s stopping me.”

“Oh, listen to us!” Delia said gaily. “Spoiling such a pretty day with disagreements! Where’s your father? Is he seeing a patient?”

Carroll didn’t answer. He had dropped his toast to his plate, and now he sat tipping his chair back defiantly, no doubt adding more dents to the linoleum. Delia sighed.

“Sweetie,” she said, “I do know how you feel. And pretty soon you can have the room, I promise. But not just yet! Not right now! Right now it still smells of his pipe tobacco.”

“It won’t once I’m living there,” Carroll said.

“But that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Shoot, I’ll take up smoking, then.”

She waved his words away with a dutiful laugh. “Anyhow,” she said. “Is your father with a patient?”

“Naw.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s out running.”

“He’s what?”

Carroll picked up his toast again and chomped down on it noisily.

“He’s doing
what?
”

“He’s running, Mom.”

“Well, didn’t you at least offer to go with him?”

“He’s only running around the Gilman track, for gosh sakes.”

“I asked you children; I begged you not to let him go alone. What if something happens and no one’s around to help?”

“Fat chance, on the Gilman track,” Carroll said.

“He shouldn’t be running anyway. He ought to be walking.”

“Running’s good for him,” Carroll said. “Look. He’s not worried. His doctor’s not worried. So what’s your problem, Mom?”

Delia could have come up with so many responses to that; all she did was press a hand to her forehead.

These were the facts she had neglected to tell that young man in the supermarket: She was a sad, tired, anxious, forty-year-old woman who hadn’t had a champagne brunch in decades. And her husband was even older, by a good fifteen years, and just this past February he had suffered a bout of severe chest pain. Angina, they said in the emergency room. And now she was terrified any time he went anywhere alone, and she hated to let him drive, and she kept finding excuses not to make love for fear it would kill him, and at night while he slept she lay awake, tensing every muscle between each of his long, slow breaths.

And not only were her children past infancy; they were huge. They were great, galumphing, unmannerly, supercilious creatures—Susie a Goucher junior consumed by a baffling enthusiasm for various outdoor sports; Ramsay a Hopkins freshman on the brink of flunking out, thanks to the twenty-eight-year-old single-parent girlfriend he had somehow acquired. (And both of them, Susie and Ramsay both, were miffed beyond belief that the family finances forced them to live at home.) And Delia’s baby, her sweet, winsome Carroll, had been replaced by this rude adolescent, flinching from his mother’s hugs and criticizing her clothes and rolling his eyes disgustedly at every word she uttered.

Like now, for instance. Determined to start afresh, she perked all her features upward and asked, “Any calls while I was gone?” and he said, “Why would I answer the
grown-ups
’ line,” not bothering to add a question mark.

Because the grown-ups buy the celery for your favorite mint pea soup
, she could have told him, but years of dealing with teenagers had turned her into a pacifist, and she merely padded out of the kitchen in her stocking feet and crossed the hall to the study, where Sam kept the answering machine.

The study was what they called it, and books did line the floor-to-ceiling shelves, but mainly this was a TV room now. The velvet draperies
were kept permanently drawn, coloring the air the dusty dark red of an old-time movie house. Soft-drink cans and empty pretzel bags and stacks of rented videotapes littered the coffee table, and Susie lounged on the couch, watching Saturday-morning cartoons with her boyfriend, Driscoll Avery. The two of them had been dating so long that they looked like brother and sister, with their smooth beige coloring and stocky, waistless figures and identical baggy sweat suits. Driscoll barely blinked when Delia entered. Susie didn’t even do that much; just flipped a channel on the remote control.

“Morning, you two,” Delia said. “Any calls?”

Susie shrugged and flipped another channel. Driscoll yawned out loud. Just for that, Delia didn’t excuse herself when she walked in front of them to the answering machine. She bent to press the Message button, but nothing happened. Electronic devices were always double-crossing her. “How do I—?” she said, and then an old man’s splintery voice filled the room. “Dr. Grinstead, can you get back to me right away? It’s Grayson Knowles, and I told the pharmacist about those pills, but he asked if—”

Whatever the pharmacist had asked was submerged by a flood of Bugs Bunny music. Susie must have raised the volume on the TV.
Beep
, the machine said, and then Delia’s sister came on. “Dee, it’s Eliza. I need an address. Could you please call me at work?”

“What’s she doing at work on a Saturday?” Delia asked, but nobody answered.

Beep
. “This is Myrtle Allingham,” an old woman stated forthrightly.

“Oh, God,” Susie told Driscoll.

“Marshall and I were wondering if you-all would like to take supper with us Sunday evening. Nothing fancy! Just us folks! And do tell young Miss Susie she should bring that darlin’ Driscoll. Say seven o’clock?”

Beep beep beep beep beep.
The end.

“We went
last
time,” Susie said, slouching lower on the couch. “Count us out.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Driscoll said. “That crab dip she served was not half bad.”

“We aren’t going, Driscoll, so forget it.”

“She’s lonesome, is all,” Delia said. “Stuck at home with her hip, no way to get around—”

Something banged overhead.

“What’s that?” she asked.

More bangs. Or clanks, really.
Clank! Clank!
at measured intervals, as if on purpose.

“Plumber?” Driscoll said tentatively.

“What plumber?”