Ladder of Years (38 page)

“Weber Street?”

“Making a phone call.”

“Ah.”

“You know you’re welcome to use the phone here,” he said.

Delia had one of those flashes where she saw herself through someone else’s eyes: huddling over the receiver and shielding her ear with one hand. She almost laughed. The Mystery Woman Strikes Again. She said, “Oh, well, it’s just that I … had to call on the spur of the moment, that was all.”

He waited, as if hoping for more, but she said nothing else.

Sometimes Delia noticed some detail in Joel—the play of muscles under the skin of his forearms, or the casual drape of his suit coat across his back—and she felt a pull so deep that she had to remind herself she hardly knew this man. In fact, they barely talked to each other. Ever since he’d bandaged her ankle they seemed to have grown tongue-tied and shy. And anyhow, they had Noah to think of.

Watchful, mistrustful Noah! Always lurking about, lately, scanning their faces for signs of guilt. One night when Joel and Delia came home from a Volunteer Tutors’ Supper (potluck, each woman meditatively eating just her own dish, for the most part), they found him waiting at the front door with his arms clamped across his chest. “What took you so long?” he demanded. “That supper was supposed to get over at nine. It’s nine forty-three, for gosh sake, and the Brookses’ house is not but five minutes away!”

Well, think about it: in October he would turn thirteen. Not an easy age, as Delia knew far too well. Already there were signs. For instance, he had spurned those clothes she’d bought him this spring. And he wanted her to leave his laundry in the hall outside his room from now on, not bring it in. And one morning after his friends had slept over, he asked her, “Do you have to wear that beachy-looking cover-up at breakfast? Don’t you own a bathrobe like normal people?”

Yes, it was clear where he was headed.

“He’s getting so tall all at once; I went to kiss him the other day and his face was just about even with mine,” Ellie said. (Often, now, the two of them talked on the phone awhile before Delia summoned Noah.) “Every time I see him, he’s changed some way! He’s started listening to this horrible music in the car, these singers who might as well be gossiping amongst themselves except every now and then you manage to overhear a stray word or two.”

“And he says he’s going to start a rock band,” Delia told her. “He and Kenny Moss.”

“But he doesn’t play an instrument!”

“Well, I don’t know. They’ve already got a name picked out: Does Your Mother Have Any Children?”

“That’s a band name?”

“So he tells me.”

“I don’t get it,” Ellie said.

“You’re not supposed to, I guess. And you heard he doesn’t want to go to camp this summer.”

“But he loves camp!”

“He says it’s babyish.”

“What will he do instead, then?”

“Oh, he’s going, willy-nilly,” Delia told her. “Joel says he has to.” She felt odd, mentioning Joel so familiarly to Ellie. She hurried on. “He’s already paid the deposit, he says, and anyhow, I won’t be here to tend him. I’ll be on vacation.”

“You will? Where?”

“Ocean City, the middle two weeks in July. Belle Flint set it up with this friend of hers who runs a motel.”

“You and I should get together while you’re there,” Ellie told her. “Have dinner one night in my favorite restaurant. I hang out in Ocean City all the time!”

Evidently she no longer thought Delia was Joel’s girlfriend. Delia wondered why. Was it seeing Delia up close that had changed her mind?

Delia felt a little bit disappointed, to be honest.

She dreamed she ran into Sam in front of Senior City. He was standing outside the double doors in his starched white coat, with his hands in his pockets, and she walked directly up to him and said, in her most positive tone, “At the Millers’ I have a full-sized bike I built all by myself out of paper clips.”

He gazed down at her thoughtfully.

“A working bike?” he asked.

“Well, no.”

She woke up still squinting against the sunlight that had flashed off his glasses. He had been wearing a stethoscope, she recalled, looped across the back of his neck like a shaving towel. He hadn’t worn a stethoscope since the first week he came to work for her father. It was a new-young-doctor thing to do, really, and new was what Sam had been
then, in spite of his age, because he’d had to spend so long working his way through school. But he never would have given her such a stern and judging look when they were first acquainted.

Or would he?

Maybe he’d been that way from the start. Maybe Adrian had it right: what annoys you most, later on, is the very thing that attracted you to begin with.

For her trip to the beach she bought a suitcase—just a cheap one from the dime store, big enough to hold her straw tote. Belle was driving her over early Saturday morning. Noah was still home when Belle honked out front (he’d be leaving for camp around noon), and Delia gave him a quick goodbye hug, which he put up with. To Joel she said, “Don’t forget to feed Vernon.”

“Who’s Vernon?”

She couldn’t think why he asked, for a moment. Then she said, “Oh! I meant George.” Silly of her: George and Vernon were not at all alike. She said, “George the
cat!
” as if it were Joel who had been confused. “Well, so long,” she told him, and she rushed out the door, her suitcase knocking against her shins.

Belle wore enormous sunglasses, the upside-down kind with the earpieces hitched at the bottom. “I have the world’s worst hangover,” she told Delia right off. “I never want to see another drop of champagne as long as I live.”

“You had champagne?”

“Did I ever. A whole entire bottle, because last night Horace proposed.”

“Oh, Belle!”

“But he couldn’t drink any himself because he’s allergic,” Belle said. “Just sat there watching
me
glug it down, following every swallow with those hound-dog eyes of his. Yes, that’s the way we do things, we two. Still, it made a nice gesture. Champagne, a dozen roses, and a diamond ring: the works.” She lifted her left hand from the wheel to display a tiny, winking glint. Then she pulled into the street. “Near as I can recall, I must have accepted. Think of it: Belle Lamb. Sounds like a noise in a comic book:
Blam!
” She was keeping her face expressionless behind the dark glasses, but there was something complacent and well-fed in the curve of her lips. “I guess now I’ll have to go through with it,” she said.

“Don’t you want to go through with it?”

“Oh, well. Sure.” She turned onto 380. “I do care about him. Or love him, I guess. At least, if he bangs his head climbing into my car I get this sort of clutch to my stomach. You reckon we could call that love?”

Delia was still considering this question as Belle went on. “But I can’t help noticing, Dee: most folks marry just because they decide they’ve reached that stage. I mean, even if they don’t have any particular person picked out yet.
Then
they pick someone out. It’s like their marriages are arranged, same as in those foreign countries—except that here, the bride and groom are the ones who do the arranging.”

Delia laughed. She said, “Well, now I don’t know
what
to say. Am I supposed to congratulate you, or not?”

“Oh, well, sure,” Belle said. “Congratulate me, I guess.” And her left hand rose swaybacked from the wheel for a moment so she could admire her diamond.

The Mermaid’s Chambers was a peeling turquoise motel on the wrong side of the highway, between a T-shirt shop and a liquor store. But Belle had got her a very good discount, and Delia wasn’t planning to spend much time in her room anyhow.

Each morning, she crossed the highway carrying her tote and a motel bedspread, along with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. She rented an umbrella on the beach and settled herself amid a crowd that thickened as the day progressed—squealing children, impossibly beautiful teenagers, parents in assorted weights and ages, and stringy white grandparents. First she sat drinking her coffee as she stared out at the horizon, and then, when she had finished, she pulled a book from her tote and started reading.

Here in Ocean City she was back to romances, an average of one a day. They seemed overblown and slushy after her library books, and she read them almost without thinking about them, paying more heed to the yellow warmth soaking through her umbrella, the cries of gulls and children, the sunburned feet scrunching past her in the sand. One day, she started a book about a bride who was kidnapped by her fiancé’s brother, and she realized partway through that this was what she’d been reading on
last
year’s vacation. She checked the title: yes,
Captive of Clarion Castle.
She gazed toward the ocean. A mother was holding her diapered baby just above reach of the surf, and the radios all around were playing
“Under the Boardwalk,” and Delia fancied she caught sight of her own self strolling south alongside the festoons of sea foam.

Toward noon she would stand up and head toward the boardwalk for lunch. She ate in one or another rinky-dink café—a sandwich shop, a pizza joint—blinking away the purple spangles that swarmed across her vision in the sudden dimness. Then she returned to her umbrella and napped awhile, after which she read a bit more. Later she took a walk down the beach, just a short walk because her ankle still sent out a little blade of tenderness every time she put any weight on it. And then she went for her one swim of the day.

She spent forever submerging, like someone removing a strip of adhesive tape by painful degrees. Arms lifted fastidiously, stomach sucked in with a gasp, she advanced at a gingerly, crabwise angle so as to present the narrowest surface to the breakers. Finally, though, she was in, and not a hair on her head was dampened if she’d played her cards right. She floated far out with a smug sense of achievement, sending a lofty, amused glance shoreward whenever the swell she bobbed on crashed against the shrieking throngs in the shallows. And she always waited for the most docile wave to carry her back to land—although sometimes she misjudged and found herself knocked off her feet and churning underwater like a load of laundry.

Then she staggered onto the beach, streaming droplets and wringing out the skirt of her suit. By that time all her sunblock would have been washed off, and her face grew steadily pinker and more freckled over the course of her vacation. Her first act when she returned to her room at the end of every day was to check the mirror, and every day a more highly colored person gazed back at her. When she peeled off her swimsuit, a second suit of fish-white skin lay beneath it. In the shower her feet developed scarlet smatterings across the tops.

She lounged on the bed in Sam’s beach robe and toweled her hair dry. Filed her nails. Watched the news. Later, when the moldy-smelling, air-conditioned air began to chill her, she dressed and went out to dinner—a different restaurant each night. Her Sundays at the Bay Arms stood her in good stead, and she dined alone serenely, making her way through three full courses as she surveyed the nearby tables. Then she sat on the boardwalk awhile, if she could find an empty bench. The racket of video games and rock music pummeled her from behind; in front stretched the empty black ocean, fringing itself white beneath a partly erased disk of moon.

She was back in her room by nine most nights. In bed by ten. She turned off the air conditioner and slept under just a sheet, lightly sweating in the warm air that drifted through her window.

One day was cloudy, with scattered, spitting rain, and she stayed inside and watched TV. Talk shows, mostly: a whole new world. People would say anything on television, she found. Family members who hadn’t spoken in years spoke at length for the camera. Women wept in public. By the time Delia turned the set off her face ached, as if she’d attended too many social events. She went out for a walk and bought a new book to read, not a romance but something more serious and believable, about poor people living in Maine. For her walk she wore her Miss Grinstead cardigan, which clung gently to her arms and made her feel like a cherished child.

Twice she sent postcards to Noah at camp.
Nice weather, nice waves
, she wrote. That sort of thing. She bought a card for Joel too but couldn’t decide what to say. In the end, she wrote Belle instead.
This was a really good idea. Thank you for setting things up for me.
Belle’s friend Mineola, a dyed brunette in pedal pushers and stiletto heels, always greeted her amiably but otherwise left her alone, which suited Delia just fine.

Occasionally some jolt to the senses—a whiff of coconut oil, the grit of sand in her swimsuit seams—brought to mind the old family beach trips. She was returning her umbrella to the rental stall one afternoon when a child cried, “Ma, make Jenny carry something too!” which swept her back into that packing-up moment toward sunset each day when children beg to stay a little bit longer and grown-ups ask who’s got the rafts, where’s the green bucket, will somebody grab the thermos? She remembered the bickering, and the sting of carelessly kicked-up sand against burned skin, and the weighty, soft-boned weariness. She recalled each less-than-perfect detail, and yet still she would have given anything to find herself in one of those moments.

Whose sneakers are these? Someone’s forgetting their sneakers! Don’t come to me tomorrow whining about your sneakers!

She bought a postcard showing a dolphin, and she wrote on it,
Dear Sam and kids, Just taking a little holiday, thinking about you all.
Then it occurred to her that they might assume she was referring to this whole past year, not a mere two weeks in Ocean City; and she wasn’t certain how to clarify her meaning. She tore the card in half and threw it away.

On her last night, she was supposed to meet Ellie at The Sailor’s Dream. She regretted having agreed to it. Carrying on a conversation
struck her all at once as a lot of work. However, canceling would have been work too, so she showed up at the appointed hour in front of the restaurant. Ellie was already standing under the awning. She wore a white halter dress shot with threads of silver, the kind of thing you’d expect to see on cruise ships, and she carried a little white purse shaped like a scallop shell. Men kept glancing over at her as they passed. “Why, Delia!
Look
at you!” she called. “Aren’t you all healthy and rosy!” Delia had forgotten how good it felt to have somebody know her by name and act glad to see her coming.