Ladder of Years (41 page)

“You realize what’s going to happen,” Joel said. He set the percolator on the counter. “Bit by bit, more and more people will say ‘bemused’ in place of ‘amused,’ thinking it’s just the twenty-dollar version, the same way they think ‘simplistic’ is a twenty-dollar ‘simple.’ And soon enough that usage will start showing up in dictionaries, without so much as a ‘non-standard’ next to it.”

“Maybe she really did mean ‘bemused,’” Delia said. “Maybe she meant her husband was puzzled; he was perplexed that she’d asked him to help.”

“No, no. Nice try, Delia, but no, she meant ‘amused,’ all right. Everything’s changing,” Joel said. “It’s getting so we’re hardly speaking English anymore.”

She looked over at him. He was winding the cord around the percolator, although it hadn’t been emptied yet or washed. “Yes, I’ve noticed that’s what bothers you, most times,” she told him.

“Hmm?”

“Most times it’s not grammatical errors—other than the obvious, like ‘me and him.’ It’s the
new
things, the changes. ‘Input’ and ‘I’m like’ and ‘warm fuzzies.’”

Joel shuddered. Too late, Delia recalled that he had never to her knowledge mentioned “warm fuzzies”—that it came from Ellie’s interview. She hurried on. “But think,” she said. “Probably half your own vocabulary was new not so long ago. Well, ‘twenty-dollar,’ for instance! These terms pop up for good reason. ‘Glitch.’ ‘Groupie.’ ‘Nickel-and-diming.’ ‘Time-shifting.’”

“What’s time-shifting?” Joel asked.

“When you record a TV program to view later. Mr. Pomfret used to say that, and I thought,
Oh, how … economical!
Don’t you sometimes
wish
for new words? Like a word for, a word for …”

“Freckles,” Joel said.

“Freckles?”

“Those freckles that are smaller than ordinary freckles,” he said. “And paler. Like gold dust.”

“And also, um, tomatoes,” Delia said, too quickly. “Yes, tomatoes. You have the true kind and then you have the other kind, the supermarket kind, the same color as the gums of false teeth, and those should be given a whole separate name.”

“And then,” Joel told her, “that different sort of surface people take on when you really begin to see them.”

She had nothing to say to that.

“They get so noticeable,” Joel said. “It seems you can feel every vein and pulse underneath their skin. You think,
All at once she’s become
… but what word would you use? Something like ‘textured,’ but textured to the vision, instead.”

His eyes seemed a softer hue of brown now, and that long, notched mouth had grown shapelier, more tender.

“Goodness!” she said, spinning toward the door. “Is that Noah?”

Although Noah had gone to Ellie’s and was not due home till bedtime. And anyhow, would be dropped off at the front of the house, not the back.

Sometimes when Delia said to herself,
Only x number of days till Susie’s wedding
, she felt a clammy sense of dread.
This is going to be so embarrassing. How will I face them? It’s not a situation I’ve been taught to handle.
But other times she thought,
Pshaw, what’s so hard about a wedding? We’ll have all those other people there as buffers. I can just breeze in, breeze out. Nothing to it.

For a while she had an idea that Susie might ask her to come early, as much as several days early, to help with preparations. At least that way she wouldn’t feel like a mere guest. She pounced hopefully on the mail every morning, cleared her throat before answering the phone, delayed notifying Joel of her plans till she knew how long she’d be gone. But Susie didn’t ask.

And sometimes she considered not attending. What purpose would she serve? They wouldn’t even miss her. A day or two after the wedding, one of them might say, “Hey! You know who didn’t show up? Delia! I just now remembered.”

And still other times, she fantasized that they could hardly wait to see her. “Delia!” they would cry, “Mom!” they would cry, running out onto the porch, letting the door slam behind them, flinging their arms around her.

No, cancel that. More likely they would ask, “What do you think
you’re
doing here? Did you imagine you could waltz back in just as if nothing had happened?”

She should remember to bring her invitation, in case there was any question.

She broached the subject to Joel at Sunday breakfast, having waited till the very last day for word from Susie. Sunday was a good time anyhow, because Noah was there, wolfing down buckwheat pancakes; the conversation couldn’t get too probing. She said, “Joel, I don’t know if I mentioned or not”—knowing full well she had not—“that I’ll need to take the day off tomorrow.”

“Oh?” he said. He lowered his newspaper.

“I have to go to Baltimore.”

“Baltimore,” he said.

“Geez, Delia!” Noah said. “I promised my wrestling coach you’d give a bunch of us a ride to the meet tomorrow.”

“Well, I can’t,” she said.

“Well, geez!
Now
what’ll we do?”

“Your coach will think of something,” Joel told him. “If you wanted to volunteer Delia’s services, you should have asked her first.” But he was keeping his eyes on Delia’s face as he spoke. “Is this a, some kind of emergency?” he asked her.

“No, no, just a wedding.”

“Ah.”

“But it’s one I’d very much like to attend, a family wedding, you know, and so I thought if you didn’t mind …”

“Of course; not at all,” Joel said. “Could I drive you to the bus station?”

“Oh, thanks, but I’m going by car,” Delia said. “Baltimore’s on Mr. Lamb’s sales route, it turns out.”

Joel probably had no idea who Mr. Lamb was, but he nodded slowly, eyes still fixed on her face.

“So!” she said. “Now, I assume I’ll be back by evening. Maybe suppertime, but I can’t be sure; I’m returning by bus; so I’ve left a chicken salad in the fridge. There’s a tub of Rick-Rack’s coleslaw next to it, biscuits in the bread drawer … But I bet I’ll be back by then, anyhow.”

“Should I meet your bus?”

“No; Belle’s doing that. I’ll call her when I get into Salisbury.”

“You could call me instead.”

“No, really, I have no idea when … it might be late at night or something. It could even be the next day; who knows?”

“The next day!” he said.

“If the reception runs very long.”

“But you
are
coming back,” he said.

“Well, of course.”

Now Noah was watching her too. He looked up from his pancakes and opened his mouth, but then he didn’t speak.

Toward noon she set out on a walk, planning to end at the Bay Arms for lunch whenever her ankle grew tired. It had rained in the morning, but now the sun was shining, and the air felt so thick and warm that she regretted wearing her sweater. She pulled it off and swung it loosely from one hand. Everywhere she looked, it seemed, she saw people she knew. Mrs. Lincoln waved to her from the steps of the A.M.E. church, and T. J. Renfro, roaring past on his Harley, called out, “What say, Teach!” and on Carroll Street she ran into Vanessa and Greggie, poking along in matching yellow slickers. “Delia! I was just about to phone you,” Vanessa said. “Want to ride with me to Salisbury tomorrow?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t,” Delia said. “I have to go to Baltimore.”

“What’s in Baltimore?”

“Well,” Delia said, “my daughter’s getting married.”

She’d told Belle this too, but nothing more, and now all at once she felt an urgent need to pour it all out. “She’s marrying her childhood sweetheart and I’m so worried how to behave at the wedding but I really want to be there; her father thinks she’s rushing things since she’s only twenty-two years old and I say—”

“Twenty-two! How old were you when you had her: twelve?”

“Nineteen,” Delia said. “I married right out of high school, practically.”

Vanessa nodded, unsurprised. Well, most of the girls in Bay Borough married right out of high school, Delia supposed. And had babies at nineteen or so. And ended up mislaying their husbands somewhere along the line. Vanessa’s only question was, “What’d you buy for a wedding gift?”

“I thought I’d wait to see what they needed.”

“That’s always smart,” Vanessa said. “Greggie! Let the bug go where it wants to. That’s what I did with my girlfriend,” she told Delia. “I thought I’d get her a hand-held mixer but then I thought no, why not wait, and I’m so glad I did because the first time I went to visit her I saw she didn’t have one single piece of Tupperware in her whole entire kitchen.”

Vanessa’s face, above the slicker, glowed with a fine film of sweat, and her eyes seemed very pure and clear, the whites almost blue-white. Delia suddenly felt like hugging her. She said, “Oh, I’d have loved to ride to Salisbury with you!”

“Well, another time,” Vanessa said. “There’s this place there we buy our barley in bulk, to make Grandma’s gripe water recipe.”

“Gripe water?” Delia asked.

“It’s for babies. Soothes the colic and the afternoon frets and the nighttime willies.”

Delia wished they made gripe water for grown-ups.

She dreamed she was in Bethany, walking down the beach. Ahead she saw a highway, a sort of narrowing and darkening of the sand until it turned to asphalt, and there sat her old Plymouth, baking in the sun. Sam encircled her upper arm to guide her toward it. He settled her inside.
He shut the door gently after her and leaned through the open window to remind her to drive carefully. She woke and stared at the motes of darkness swarming above her bed.

From Noah’s room she heard a repetitive dry cough, beginning sharply each time as if he’d tried first to hold it in—one of those infuriating night coughs that won’t quit. For half an hour or so, she lay debating whether to get up and bring him the lozenges from the medicine cabinet. Possibly he would stop coughing on his own. Or possibly he was asleep, in which case she hated to wake him. But the cough continued, pausing and then resuming just when she thought it was finished. And then she heard the creak of a floorboard, so she knew he wasn’t asleep.

She rose and went to open her door. “Noah?” she whispered.

Instantaneously, almost, Joel was standing in front of her. She couldn’t see him so much as feel him, as the blind are said to feel—a tall, dense, solid shape giving off warmth, his moon-pale pajamas only gradually emerging from the dark of the windowless hall.

“Yes, Delia?” he whispered.

He had misunderstood, she realized. “Noah” and “Joel” sounded so much alike. The same thing often happened when she called one of them to the phone. She said, “I thought I heard Noah.”

“I was just going to see to him,” he said.

“Oh.”

“I’ll bring him some of those cough drops.”

“All right.”

But neither one of them moved.

Then he stepped forward and took her head between his hands, and she raised her face and closed her eyes and felt herself drawn toward him and enfolded, surrounded, with his lips pressing her lips and his palms covering her ears so all she could hear was the rush of her own blood.

That, and Noah’s sudden cough.

They broke apart. Delia stepped back into her room and reached for her door with trembling hands and shut herself inside.

19

Mr. Lamb’s car was a dull-green Maverick with one orange fender and a coat-hanger antenna. Inside, several scale-model windows filled the back seat—wood-framed, double-sashed, none more than twelve inches tall. Little girls from the neighborhood were always begging to play with them. The bottom of his trunk was paved with panes of clear plastic, so that when Delia leaned in with her suitcase, she had an impression of bending over a gleaming body of water. Mr. Lamb told her the plastic was pretty near indestructible. “Slide your suitcase right on top,” he told her. “It won’t do the least bit of harm. That’s where our product beats anything else on the market. When I go to a house that has pets? I like to lay a square of Rue-Ray on the floor and let a dog or cat march straight across, gritching with its toenails.”

Rue-Ray, Delia knew, took its name from the married couple who owned the company, Ruth Ann and Raymond Swann. They lived above their workshop on Union Street, and Mr. Lamb was their one and only salesman. She had learned all this from Belle, but still she felt like laughing at the sound of those two slurred, slippery
R
’s.

It also struck her as comical that Mr. Lamb turned out to be so talkative. Before they reached Highway 50, even, he had gone from storm windows (their noise-reduction powers) to the wedding gift he planned
for Belle (a complete set of Rue-Rays, fully installed) to his philosophy of salesmanship. “The important thing to remember,” he said, veering around a tractor, “is that people like to proceed through a process. A regular set of steps for every activity. For instance, the waitress wants to give you your bill before you hand her your credit card. The mechanic wants to tell all about your fuel pump before you say to go ahead and fix it. So I ask my customers, I ask, ‘You notice any drafts? Northern rooms any colder than southern?’
I
know they’ve noticed drafts. I can hear their durn windows rattle as I’m speaking. But if I let folks kind of like describe the symptoms first—say how the baby’s room is so cold at night she has to wear one of those blanket sleepers with the fold-over flaps for the hands—why, they get this sense a certain order has been followed, understand? Then I’m more apt to make the sale.”

Unfortunately, he was one of those drivers who feel the need to look at the person they’re talking to. He kept his muddy, deep-socketed eyes fixed on Delia, his scrawny neck twisted in his collar, while Delia glued her own eyes to the road as if to make up for it. She watched a column of cypress trees approach, then a long-dead motel as low to the ground and sprawling as a deserted chicken shed, then a strip of fog-filled woods where entire clouds seemed trapped in a web of branches. Only a few leaves here and there had developed a faint tinge of orange, and she could imagine that it was still summer—that it was last summer, even, and she had not lost the year in between.

“Many people don’t realize that salesmen consider such things,” Mr. Lamb was saying. “But salesmen are a very considering bunch, you’ll find. I say it comes from traveling by car so much. Belle had an idea we should travel by car for our honeymoon, but I told her I just didn’t know if I’d focus on her right, driving along with my own thoughts like I do.”