Ladder of Years (39 page)

The Sailor’s Dream had the padded-leather atmosphere of an English gentlemen’s club, but with some differences. The carpet, for instance, gave off the same mushroom smell as the one in Delia’s motel room. And all the waiters were deeply tanned.

“So tell me,” Ellie said as soon as they were seated. “Have you been having a good time?”

“A lovely time,” Delia told her.

“Was this your first vacation by yourself?”

“Oh, yes,” Delia said. “Or rather …”

She wasn’t sure whether traveling alone to Bay Borough qualified as a vacation or not. (And if it did, when had her vacation ended and her real life begun?) She met Ellie’s eyes, which were fixed on her expectantly.

“Doesn’t it feel funny going swimming on your own?” Ellie asked.

“Funny? No.”

“And what about eating? Have you been eating in your room all this time?”

“Goodness, no! I ate out.”

“I
hate
to eat out alone,” Ellie said. “You don’t know how I admire you for that.”

They had to stop talking to give their orders—crab imperial for Delia, large green salad hold the dressing for Ellie—but as soon as the waiter moved away, Ellie said, “Did you practice beforehand? Before you left your, ah, previous place of residence?”

“Practice?”

“Did you
use
to eat out alone?”

Delia began to see what Ellie was up to here: she was hoping to gather some tips on how to manage single life. For next she said, “I never did, myself. I never even walked down a street alone, hardly! Always had some escort at my elbow. I was awfully popular as a girl. Now I wish I’d
been a little less popular. You know how long ago I first thought of leaving Joel? Three months after we were married.”

“Three months!”

“But I kept thinking,
What would I do on my own, though?
Everyone would stare at me, wonder what was wrong with me.”

She leaned even closer to Delia. Lowered her voice. “Dee,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Did you
have
to leave?”

Delia drew back slightly.

“Like, were you in just … an impossible position? Had to get out? Couldn’t have survived another minute?”

“Well, no,” Delia said.

“I don’t want to pry! I’m not asking for secrets. All I want to know is, how desperate does a person need to get before she’s certain she should go?”

“Desperate? Oh, well, I wouldn’t say … well, I’m
still
not certain, really.”

“You’re not?”

“I mean, it wasn’t an actual decision,” Delia told her.

“Take me, let’s say,” Ellie said. “Do you think I made a mistake? There you are in that house with my husband; do you think I was overreacting to leave him?”

“I’m not married to him, though. There’s a difference.”

“But you must know what he’s like, by now. You know how persnickety he is and how … right all the time and always criticizing.”

“Joel, criticizing?” Delia asked. “Belle Flint says he worships you! He’s trying to keep the house exactly like you left it—hasn’t anyone told you?”

“Oh, yes,
after
I left it,” Ellie said. “But while I was there it was, ‘Why can’t you do it this way, Ellie?’ and, ‘Why can’t you do it that way, Ellie?’ and these big cold silent glowers if I didn’t.”

“Is that so,” Delia said.

And just then she saw Sam standing in front of the fridge, delivering one of his lectures on the proper approach to uncooked poultry. Sam was so phobic about food poisoning you’d think they lived in some banana republic, while Joel never mentioned it. No, Joel’s concerns were more endearing, she thought—his household maps and his chore charts. They so plainly arose from a need for some sense of stability. All he was really after was
sureness.

Or could the same be said for Sam?

Their food arrived, and the waiter flourished a pepper mill as big as a newel post. He asked, “Would either of you like—?”

“No, no, go away,” Ellie said, waving a hand. As soon as they were alone again, she turned back to Delia. “Three months after our wedding,” she said, “Joel went to a conference in Richmond. I said to myself, ‘Free!’ I felt like dancing through the house. I almost
flew
through the house. I played this kind of game with myself, went through all his drawers and packed his clothes in boxes. Packed what hung in his closet too. Pretended I lived by myself, with no one peering over my shoulder. He wasn’t due home till Wednesday, and I planned to put everything back Tuesday night so he’d never guess what I’d done. Except he came home early. Tuesday noon. ‘Ellie?’ he said. ‘What
is
this?’ ‘Oh,’ I told him, ‘it’s just I wanted to picture what it would feel like to have more drawer space.’ That’s how women get their reputations for ditsiness. The real reason wasn’t ditsy in the least, but who’s going to tell him the real reason?”

She hadn’t touched her salad. Delia plucked a piece of crab cartilage from her tongue and set it on the side of her plate.

“In a way, the whole marriage was kind of like the stages of mourning,” Ellie said. “Denial, anger … well, it
was
mourning. I’d go to parties and look around; I’d wonder, did all the other women feel the same as me? If not, how did they avoid it? And if so, then maybe I was just a crybaby. Maybe it was some usual state of affairs that everybody else gracefully put up with.”

Finally she speared a lettuce leaf. She nibbled it off her fork with just her front teeth, rabbitlike, all the while fixing Delia with her hopeful blue gaze.

“That reminds me of Melinda Hawser,” Delia told her. “This woman I met at Belle’s last Thanksgiving. The way she talked, I figured she’d be divorced by Christmas! But I run into her uptown from time to time and she’s still as married as ever. Looks perfectly fine.”

“Exactly,” Ellie said. “So you can’t help thinking,
Wouldn’t I have been fine too? Shouldn’t I have stuck it out?
And you get to remembering the good things. The way he loved to watch me put on my face for a party so I always felt I was doing something bewitching; or after the baby was born, when we weren’t allowed to have sex for six weeks and so we just kissed, the most wonderful kisses …” Now the blue eyes were swimming with tears. “Oh, Delia,” she said. “I
did
make a mistake. Didn’t I?”

Delia looked tactfully toward a brass lamp. She said, “It’s not as if you couldn’t
un
make it. Jump in the car and drive back home.”

“Never,” Ellie said, and she dabbed beneath each eye with her napkin. “I would never give him the satisfaction,” she said.

And what would have become of Delia if Ellie had answered otherwise?

Belle told Delia she hadn’t missed a thing in Bay Borough, not a blessed thing. “Dead as a tomb,” she said, driving languidly, one-handed. “Little fracas in town council—Zeke Pomfret wants to drop the baseball game from Bay Day this year, switch to horseshoes or something, and Bill Frick wants to keep it. But no surprises
there
, right? And Vanessa swears she’s known about me and Horace all along, but I don’t believe her. And we’ve set the wedding date: December eighteenth.”

“Oh, Christmastime!” Delia said.

“I wanted an excuse to wear red velvet,” Belle told her.

They left the glitter of the beaches behind and rode through plainer, simpler terrain. Delia watched shabby cottages slide by, then staid old farmhouses, then an abandoned produce stand that was hardly more than a heap of rotting gray lumber. She would never have guessed, the first time she traveled this road, that she could find such scenery appealing.

At the Millers’ house, the front lawn was mowed too short and crisply edged, and each shrub stood in a circle of fresh hardwood chips. Evidently Joel had found himself with an abundance of spare time. Inside, the cat cold-shouldered her and then trailed her footsteps in a guilt-provoking way as Delia walked through the empty rooms. The house was tidy but somehow desolate, with subtle signs of bachelorhood like a huge wet dish towel instead of a proper washrag hanging over the kitchen faucet, and a thin film of grease coating the stove knobs and cupboard handles (those out-of-the-way places men never think to clean). On her bureau, a note read:
Delia—I’ve gone to pick up Noah. Don’t fix supper; we’ll all grab a bite out someplace.
J. Also, she had mail: a handwritten invitation on stiff cream paper.
Driscoll Spence Avery and Susan Felson Grinstead request your presence at their wedding, 11 a.m. Monday, September 27, in the Grinstead living room.
R.S.V.P.

What a lot could be deciphered from a couple of dozen words! For starters, the writing was Susie’s (blue ink, running steeply downhill) and
no parents’ names were mentioned—certain proof that she was proceeding on her own. Sam must have acquiesced, though, because the wedding would take place at the house. The date was harder to figure. Why September? Why a Monday morning? And had Susie found a job or had she not?

Delia wished she could phone and ask, but she felt she didn’t have the right. She would have to respond by mail, like any other guest.

Of course she planned to attend.

She looked up and met her own face in the bureau mirror—her eyes wide and stricken, her freckles standing out sharply.

When they told her that her firstborn was a girl, she had been over-joyed. Secretly, she had wished for a girl. She had planned how she would dress her in little smocked dresses; but Susie, it turned out, insisted on jeans as soon as she could talk. She had planned how they would share womanly activities (sewing, baking pies, experimenting with skin-care products), but Susie preferred sports. And instead of a big white wedding, with Susie swathed in antique lace and both her parents beaming as they jointly (in the modern manner) gave her away, here Delia stood in an Eastern Shore ranch house, wondering what sort of ceremony her daughter was inviting her to.

Noah seemed to have grown two inches while he was at camp, and the macramé bracelets he wore around both wrists pointed up the new brownness and squareness of his hands. Also, he’d developed a habit of saying, “Are you inputting that?” in a way that already seemed to be exasperating Joel. They sat in a booth at Rick-Rack’s, Joel and Noah on one side and Delia on the other, and she could observe Joel’s wince even if Noah couldn’t.

“Take my word for it,” Joel told him finally. “I have indeed managed to grasp your meaning, but I would certainly not choose to convey that fact in computer jargon.”

“Huh? So anyhow,” Noah said, “at camp they made us do fifty pushups every morning. Fifty, are you inputting that? I guess they wanted to kill us off and keep our fees for nothing. So me and Ronald went to the infirmary—”

“Ronald and I,” Joel said.

“Right, and tried to get a health excuse. But the dumbhead nurse wouldn’t write one. She goes, like—”

“She said.”

“She said, like—”

Their food came—burgers for Noah and Joel, pork barbecue sandwich for Delia. “Thanks, Teensy,” Noah said.

“Sure thing,” Teensy said cheerfully.

“Mrs. Rackley to
you
,” his father told him.

Noah glanced across at Delia. Delia merely smiled at him.

“Daddy’s been asking where you got to these last couple of weeks,” Teensy said to Delia.

“I went to Ocean City.”

“Yes, I told him so, but he couldn’t seem to keep it in mind. He said, ‘She never even mentioned it! Just walked on out and left!’ His memory’s a whole lot worse lately.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Delia said.

“He says things are coming at him too fast for him to take in. And Rick tells him, just trying to be nice, tells him, ‘Oh, I know exactly what you—’ but Daddy says, ‘Don’t you poke your black self into this!’ and I said, ‘
Daddy!
’—”

Teensy broke off, glancing at Joel. “Well,” she said. “I guess I better get back to work.”

She slid her hands down her apron front and hurried away.

“Remarkable,” Joel said.

He seemed to have no inkling that it was his impassive gaze that had sent her rushing off.

“Maybe Mr. Bragg should go live in Senior City,” Noah said.

“I don’t think he can afford it,” Delia told him.

“Maybe they have scholarships. Or grants or something, are you inputting that?”

Joel rolled his eyes.

“So anyhow,” Noah said, picking up his burger. “Next thing, me and Ronald worked out that we’d pretend we were injured. Only we couldn’t do it both at once, because it would look kind of fishy.”

“You went about it all wrong,” Joel told him. “Nothing good ever comes of resorting to subterfuge.”

“To what?”

“Subterfuge.”

“What’s that?”

Joel stared across the table at Delia. His eyebrows were raised so high that his forehead resembled corduroy.

“He means something underhanded,” Delia told Noah. “Something sneaky.”

“Oh.”

“He means you should have protested the rule openly. Or so I assume.” She expected Joel to elaborate, but he was still gaping. “Is that what you meant?” she asked him.

“He doesn’t know what ‘subterfuge’ is!” Joel said.

She took her sandwich apart and started spooning in coleslaw.

“He never heard the word ‘subterfuge.’ Can you believe it?”

She wouldn’t answer. Noah said, “It’s no big deal. Geez.”

“No big deal!” Joel echoed. “Don’t they teach kids anything in school these days? ‘Subterfuge’ is not all that arcane, for God’s sake.”

Delia watched Noah decide not to ask what “arcane” meant.

“Sometimes I think the language is just shrinking down to the size of a wizened little pellet,” Joel told her. “Taken over by rubbish words, while the real words disappear. The other day, I discovered our cafeteria supervisor didn’t know what cutlery was.”

“Cutlery?” she asked.

“It seems the word has dropped out of use.”

“‘Cutlery’ has dropped out of use?”

“That’s the only explanation I can think of. I told him we were ordering a new supply of cutlery, and he said, ‘What’s that?’”

“Oh, fiddlesticks,” Delia said. “
You
know what cutlery is,” she told Noah.