Back When We Were Grownups (17 page)

She collected her purse and walked out. He didn’t try to stop her.

*  *  *

All the way home she talked to herself, and shook her head, and blinked back angry tears. “How could I have been so stupid?” she asked. “So outspoken? So forward?” She turned the air-conditioning higher. Her face was filmed with a layer of sweat as slick and tight as shrink-wrap. “But why did he say he’d meet me, if that was the way he felt? Why did he phone me back, even? Oh,” she wailed, “and I should have paid half of the dinner check!” She risked a glance toward the rearview mirror. She decided that her two fans of hair made her look like a Texas longhorn.

Baltimore was solid and familiar and reassuring, its buildings twinkling with safety lights. She rolled her window down and breathed in the sooty petroleum smell, which struck her as refreshing. And the windows of the Open Arms, when she pulled up, glowed so kindly. She parked and unfolded herself from the car. Her skirt was as wrinkled as wastepaper. The colors of her outfit—red, white, and blue, for Lord’s sake!—reminded her of that cheap disposable picnic ware intended for the Fourth of July.

She climbed the front steps and unlocked the door. “I’m home!” she called.

“Hah?” Poppy said from upstairs. She heard laughter on the TV—a sound that ordinarily grated against her nerves, but tonight she found it cozy.

She went straight to the kitchen and set down her purse and looked for something to eat. Standing in front of the open fridge, she devoured two chicken legs, the last of a pasta salad, and several cherry tomatoes. She polished off a container of coleslaw and half a jar of crab-apple rings left over from Thanksgiving. She was so hungry she felt hollow. It seemed no amount of food could ever fill her.

Six

E
arly on the last Wednesday morning in August, Joey and Lateesha rang Rebecca’s doorbell. Lateesha was carrying the pink crib pillow she never slept without, and both children wore knapsacks. Behind them stood Hakim—a considerable distance behind, all the way out on the curb, almost back in his car already. “I take Min Foo to the hospital!” he shouted. “The pains are five minutes apart!”

“All right! Good luck!” Rebecca said, and she blew a kiss to Min Foo. “Just remind yourself, sweetheart, you’re going to get a baby out of this!”

Min Foo said, “What? Well,
yes
. The kids haven’t had breakfast yet, Mom.”

“I’ll see to it,” Rebecca promised, laying an arm around each child.

As soon as the car had driven off, she led the children upstairs to the third-floor guest room. “Isn’t this exciting?” she asked as she helped Lateesha shuck her knapsack. “By lunchtime, I bet, you’ll have a brand-new brother or sister!”

They didn’t seem all that thrilled. They had the bleary, befuddled look of sleepers awakened too suddenly, and they followed her back down to the kitchen in a shuffling silence. When she set out toast and jam, Lateesha’s eyes filled with tears. “The jam’s got dots!” she said. “It’s got dots that will stick in my teeth!”

“Those are raspberry seeds, dummy,” Joey said.

“Joey called me a dummy!”

“Now, now,” Rebecca said. “Never mind; I’ll find you some nice grape jelly.”

Then Poppy came down wanting
his
breakfast, and he needed the situation explained to him several times. “Min Foo’s having a baby? I thought she was divorced,” he said.

“She was, Poppy, but then she married Hakim, remember?”

“Hakim! Good glory, not another black man!”

“No, Poppy, he’s Arab. What a way to talk,” Rebecca said, sending a glance toward Lateesha. But Lateesha was absorbed in spreading grape jelly precisely to the edges of her toast, and she seemed oblivious.

After breakfast, Rebecca made up the two beds in the guest room and propped Lateesha’s pink pillow against one headboard. This had probably once been a servant’s room. It was small and stuffy, with an oppressively low ceiling and a single narrow window. In one corner stood a dark wooden bookcase crammed with curling paperbacks, faded textbooks from the girls’ school days, and the histories and biographies that Rebecca used to read in college. She used to get crushes, almost, on people like Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln. She would study them in depth, try to learn every detail of their lives in much the same way that her roommate studied the lives of movie stars.

And she had once been so political! She had picketed the Macadam cafeteria on behalf of its underpaid workers; she had marched against the war in Vietnam; she had plastered the door of her dorm room with anti-nuclear stickers. Now she could barely bring herself to vote. All she read in the newspaper was Ann Landers and her horoscope. Her eyes slid over Kosovo and Rwanda and hurried on.

It occurred to her that so far, the only step she’d taken toward retrieving that old Rebecca was to try and reconnect with the old Rebecca’s boyfriend. Like some fluff-headed girl from the fifties, she had assumed she would reach her goal by riding a man’s coattails.

Just as well that she had failed, she told herself. (Although still, more than two weeks later, the memory of her dinner with Will continued to pinch her pride.)

The telephone rang and she flew downstairs, calling, “Get that, somebody! Answer the phone!” because she thought it might be Hakim. But it was only the man from Second Eden, arranging to come replace the dead azaleas in the backyard. “Now, I don’t want to do it quite yet,” he said, “because it’s still kind of warm. Could turn downright hot again, even, and I always advise waiting till—”

“My daughter’s having a baby; could you get off the line?” she said.

“Oh! Sorry.”

“Not that I mean to be rude,” she said, instantly feeling guilty. “It’s just, you know how it is when one of your children—”

“Ma’am. Believe me.
My
daughter had twins. Me and my wife sat in that waiting room twenty-one hours.”

“Twenty-one hours!”

“The nurses kept saying, ‘You-all might want to go home and come back,’ but we said, ‘No, sir. No, indeed. No way, José. Not on your life,’ we said, and it got to be suppertime, got to be dark, got to be the next morning—”

“I have to get off the line,” Rebecca told him. She hung up, and then felt guilty all over again.

It seemed she always developed a stomachache when one of the girls was in labor. Unconsciously, she would spend the duration holding in her abdominal muscles. It made her wonder how the nurses in delivery rooms survived.

As luck would have it, no party had been scheduled for that evening. The Open Arms was going through a slow spell. But to keep the children amused, she hauled out all the candleholders and set them on the dining-room table. Then she unloaded a mammoth shopping bag of fresh candles. “Put in any color you like,” she said. “After that you can light them for a minute, just so they’ll lose that new look. Only while I’m in the room, though; you understand?”

She watched Joey choose a taper striped red and white like a barber pole—a bit Christmassy, but never mind. She said, “Now that fall’s on the way, we can start using candles at parties again. I always hate to give them up over the summer, but it’s true they have a sort of warming effect psychologically, even if they don’t produce that much actual heat.”

The telephone in the kitchen bleeped once and fell silent. Rebecca paused for several seconds, but no rings followed.

“When I was a little girl,” she went on, “my Aunt Ida gave me this beautiful, tall white candle with a kind of frill of white lace running up it in a spiral. I thought it was the most elegant thing I’d ever seen in my life. I saved it in my bureau drawer for some momentous event, although I can’t imagine now what that would have been. I mean, I was only eight years old. Not a whole lot of momentous events happen when you’re eight. And Aunt Ida would ask me, now and then, ‘Have you ever burned that candle?’ I’d say, ‘No, not yet. I’m saving it,’ I’d say. Then one day, oh, maybe three or four years later, I came across it in my drawer. It had turned all yellow and warped; it was practically a C shape, and the lace was coming off in crumbles. I’d never seen it burning, and now I never would. So ever since that time, I light my candles any chance I get. I light them by the dozens, all over every room, at every party from September through May.
Multitudes
of candles.”

She handed each child a box of matches, and they started lighting the candles that marched the length of the table—tapers and pillars and votive lights, white and colored and striped and gilded, blazing in the dim room like a skyful of stars.

*  *  *

It was after one o’clock when Hakim finally called. “I have a son!” he said. “He is huge: eight pounds ten ounces. Is looking just like me. Min Foo is feeling fine and sending all her love.”

“What’s his name?” Rebecca asked.

“We have no name. NoNo said that it would only be a girl.”

“Oh. Right,” Rebecca said.

She let the children telephone their aunts and all their friends to spread the news, and after that she hauled out her decorating supplies and the three of them made a poster reading
WELCOME HOME, MOM AND LITTLE BROTHER
. Then Poppy came down from his nap and they all drank a ginger-ale toast in Mother Davitch’s sherbet glasses. Poppy seemed to have the impression that the baby was Rebecca’s, but he got that straightened out in due course.

When Hakim called again, in the late afternoon, Rebecca drove the children to the hospital for a visit. “You two are lucky,” she told them on the way. “It used to be they wouldn’t let children visit before they were twelve. Your aunts didn’t see your mother till I brought her home from the hospital.”

Hard to believe that had been thirty-two years ago. To Rebecca, it seemed as vivid as last week: the nearly imperceptible weight of that tiny body, the warmth of that downy head nestling in the crook of her neck as she climbed the front steps, and the three little girls in the doorway, goggle-eyed and awed, reaching out reverently to touch the baby’s foot.

When she was handed her new grandson in the hospital room—another modern development, no plate-glass window between them—she had a moment of confusion where it seemed he was Min Foo. He had Min Foo’s paintbrush hair and caraway-seed eyes, and he peered curiously up at Rebecca as if he thought he might know her from somewhere. “Look,” she told the children. “He’s saying, ‘Who are
you?
What kind of people have I ended up with, here? How am I going to like living on this planet?’”

She hoped they didn’t notice the ridiculous break in her voice.

*  *  *

When they got home again, bringing carry-out chicken and French fries for supper, they found Poppy playing solitaire on the coffee table in the front parlor. “I couldn’t stand it up in the family room,” he told them, “because that telephone kept ringing, ringing, ringing. Durn thing nearly rang my ear off.”

“Did you answer it?” Rebecca asked.

“No,” he said, “I let them leave a message. Yammer, yammer away on that benighted machine of yours.”

But when she went upstairs to check, she found only three messages. “Well, this here’s Alice Farmer,” was the first. “I know you don’t plan on no parties this weekend but I want to come in anyhow because I need the money. My brother’s girl Berenice is turning twenty. You remember Berenice, who’s afflicted with eating disorder . . .” Then she sort of wandered off, still talking but growing fainter.

The second message was a long pause and a click.

The third, recorded one minute after the second, was, “Rebecca, um, it’s Will.”

She drew back sharply.

“I was just afraid you might have gotten the wrong idea,” he said. “I don’t know why you felt you had to rush off like that. You didn’t even eat your salmon! The waiter asked if anything was wrong. I’m afraid you might have misunderstood me. Could you please call me back, please?”

She frowned at the machine for a moment. Then she pressed the Delete button.

*  *  *

Thursday morning she took the children to the zoo, where they spent some time commiserating with the dusty, panting lions. From there they went to the hospital. The baby was off getting circumcised, with Hakim (a cardiologist) watching from the sidelines and no doubt wringing his hands, and Min Foo was sitting up in bed doing a crossword puzzle; so Rebecca took a short walk in order to give the children a private visit with their mother. She stopped at the nursery window, where rows of infants lay in their cots like little wrapped burritos, and then she went back to the room. The baby had returned in a state of outrage and was being soothed and cooed over. Lateesha was sucking her thumb, which she hadn’t done in some time. Rebecca suggested to the children that they go home and have a picnic lunch in the backyard.

In the afternoon LaVon came by, Lateesha’s father, and carried the children off to watch his jazz band practice. (He was actually a fourth-grade teacher, but he had hopes of someday becoming a professional musician.) When he brought them back he stayed for Thursday-night supper; so Rebecca thought of his appearance as sort of a mixed blessing. Not that she wasn’t pleased to see him. He was a funny, charming, high-spirited young man, inclined toward African-print shirts and wild hairdos, so full of energy that he all but danced even when he was standing still. But Hakim was at supper too, and he tended to act somewhat bristly around his predecessor. Also, Min Foo would hear about this and throw a fit. “Why are you so nice to LaVon?” she’d be bound to ask. “Don’t you understand that he’s out of the picture now?” To which Rebecca would answer, “I can’t turn my feelings off like a faucet, honey, every time you choose to dump another husband.”

Although she did turn her feelings
on,
in a way, because she had always sworn that she would welcome newcomers to the family. She had promised herself that, Aunt Ida–like, she would declare her door to be permanently ajar, and she had kept her promise so faithfully that now she couldn’t say for certain whether she truly loved her sons-in-law or merely thought she did.

Anyhow, what difference did it make? They were good husbands, all of them—including Troy, the non-husband. Good husbands and good fathers. (Well, maybe except for Joey’s father, the antique Professor Drake, who had moved to some Greek island after his banishment and ceased all communication.) She smiled now to see how comfortably LaVon tipped back in his chair as he argued some musical issue with Troy, who taught theory at the Peabody Conservatory. Poppy was interrupting to say that nothing remotely worth listening to had been written after 1820. “My favorite composer is Haydn,” he said. “It’s true I used to think he was sort of music-boxy, but that was before I went to a concert and heard him play in person.”

“In . . . what?” LaVon asked, not having been exposed lately to Poppy and his lapses.

Rebecca hastened to tinkle a fork against her iced-tea glass. “Okay, everybody!” she said. “Time to propose a toast to Abdul!”

That was the name the parents had finally chosen for the new baby: Abdul Abdulazim. Rebecca liked pronouncing it. “To Abdul Abdulazim!” she said now. “His arrival makes us beam.” Abdul’s father, Hakim Abdulazim (whose name was even more fun to pronounce) sat up straighter and raised his chin proudly. “It’s such a pleasure to have a new boy,” Rebecca chanted, “Let’s hope he’s as nice as Lateesha and Joey!”

Hakim lifted his glass, and so did the two children, but the others just murmured, “Cheers,” and went on with their conversations. They heard so many toasts, after all. Rebecca could sympathize. It seemed she was constantly mustering enthusiasm for her family’s engagements and weddings and births, their children’s straight A’s and starring roles and graduations. Sometimes, for lack of any other reason, she proposed a toast to Thursday. “To Thursday once again, and so many of us together! To good food and good talk, and lovely summer weather!” (Or spring weather, or fall, or winter weather.) And that was not even counting all those professional events—her clients’ Christmases and New Years, their business promotions and mergers and retirements, their everlasting anniversaries and confirmations and bar mitzvahs and bridal showers.