Back When We Were Grownups (32 page)

Well,
this
would take a while. Rebecca downed the rest of her champagne and looked for a place to set her glass. Then she felt someone’s hand on the small of her back. When she turned, she found Zeb just behind her. He said, “That was just Patch being Patch. She didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Oh,” she said, “what do I care?”

But to her distress, the tears welled up again.

“The fact is,” she told Zeb, “I’m a superficial woman.”

She had meant to say “superfluous” (she was thinking again of the movie credits—how she might as well not have been present), but she didn’t correct herself; so Zeb, misunderstanding, said, “They can’t expect a Shakespearean sonnet, for heaven’s sake.”

“And another thing,” she said, regardless of who overheard her. “How come everyone calls me
Beck
? Beck is not my name! I’m Rebecca! How did I get to be Beck, all at once?”

“
I
don’t call you Beck,” Zeb pointed out.

This was true, she realized. But she went on. “’Beck’s unrelenting jollity’—that’s what Biddy told Troy this morning. I heard her, out in the kitchen. ‘This party will be a breeze,’ I heard her say. ‘We’ve got Poppy’s truckload of desserts, and enough champagne to float a ship, and Beck’s unrelenting jollity . . .’”

“Why don’t we find you a seat,” Zeb said, and he increased the pressure on the small of her back and steered her through the crowd. “Excuse us, please. Excuse us.”

People gave way, not noticing, still listening to Poppy’s speech. He had traveled past the waffles now and arrived at his morning shave. “. . . anything nicer than soft, rich lather and a plenitude of hot water? The bathroom’s warm and soapy-smelling; the mirror’s a steamy blur. You draw the razor down your cheek and leave this smooth swath of skin . . .”

No chairs were free, but Zeb guided Rebecca toward the piano, where Emmy and Joey were sitting, and asked if they’d mind moving. “Your grandma’s tired,” he told them. They jumped up, and Rebecca dropped heavily onto the bench. She
was
tired, come to think of it. She buried her nose in her empty glass and remembered, unexpectedly, a long-ago childhood crying fit that had ended when her father brought her a tumbler of ginger ale. (The same spicy, tingly smell, the same saltiness in her nostrils.) Then Zeb’s fingers closed around the stem of her glass, and she let him take it away to where Barry was pouring refills.

“The best thing about solitaire is, it’s so solitary,” Poppy was saying. “You’re allowed to think these aimless thoughts and nobody asks what you’re up to. You lay out the cards,
slip slip slip
—a peaceful sound—and then you sit a while and think, and the mantel clock is tick-tocking and the smell of fresh hot coffee is coming up from downstairs . . .”

People seemed to have reached the conclusion that Poppy’s speech was background music. They were discreet; they kept their voices low, but they were going about their own affairs now. Lateesha was drawing a face on a balloon with a squeaky felt-tip marker. NoNo and Min Foo had the giggles. Mr. Ames had waylaid Zeb to tell him something medical—displaying a gnarled wrist and flexing it this way and that while Zeb bent his head politely.

J.J. sat down on the bench beside Rebecca and confided that he wasn’t entirely at ease about his wife. “What seems to be the trouble?” Rebecca whispered, and he said, “I believe her pastor paid that visit because she asked him to. I believe she’s starting to wonder why she married me.”

“Oh, J.J., don’t you think you’re just anxious because of what happened with Denise?” Rebecca asked. “You’ve been a wonderful husband! You took her on that anniversary trip to Ocean City—”

“Yes, but I believe the more niggling things—the, like, wearing my socks to bed, which she hates . . .”

Lunch, Poppy was saying, had been precisely what he’d requested: a peanut-butter-jelly sandwich on whole wheat. “Oh, I know it’s not foie gras,” he said, “but there’s something so satisfactory about a p.b.j. done right. And this was done exactly right: the grape jelly smeared so thick that it had started soaking through, making these oozy purple stains like bruises on the bread . . .”

Rebecca’s mother and Aunt Ida tiptoed across the room with their purses tucked under their arms. They picked their way around a game of jacks on the rug and trilled their fingers toward Rebecca. “Don’t get up!” Aunt Ida mouthed, but of course Rebecca did get up. She followed them out to the foyer, where they could speak in normal tones.

“I won’t urge you to stay,” she said as she helped them into their things. “I know you want to be home before dark.” Already the light outside was dimming, she noticed. Both women placed soft, dry kisses on her cheek, and Aunt Ida said, “Thanks for a lovely party, darlin’.”

“Thank you for coming.”

“But I didn’t quite understand about the guest list,” her mother said.

“Sorry?”

“Who
were
some of those people? They seemed . . . beside the point.”

Ordinarily Rebecca would have been annoyed, but something about her mother’s wording struck her as comical, and so she merely laughed and said, “Drive safely.”

“We don’t want that Martin Luther King Boulevard,” she heard her mother tell her aunt as they walked toward the street. “Don’t want to get onto that ramp where the highways loop off like spaghetti . . .”

Other guests were stirring now. They were looking at their watches, sending meaningful glances toward the people they had come with. Oh, it always made Rebecca feel so bereft when a party hit that winding-down stage! The front parlor had a ragged look, with its empty chairs here and there and its scattered gift wrap. Instead of returning to her bench, she took a seat on the couch next to Peter. “Where’s he got to?” she whispered—meaning Poppy.

“Nap time,” he whispered back.

Nap time, and cool white sheets that warmed as they grew used to you. “It’s like you’ve made yourself a nest the exact same shape as your body,” Poppy was saying. “It’s this body-shape of warmth, and if you find you’re a little
too
warm, you just move your feet the least little bit and there’s this fresh new coolness.”

The person who kept replaying the videotape was Merrie; or at least Merrie was the person in front of the VCR at the moment, sitting tailor-fashion on the floor as close as she could get and studying one of the Christmases. Well, she was at that age, of course: seven. Still young enough to be interested in what kind of child her mother had been. In fact, Patch had been a downright homely child, as Rebecca recollected now that she watched her roller-skate across the screen. A spiky, knobby, wiry child, quarrelsome and thorny, not nurturing like Biddy or winsome like NoNo. But Patch was the first stepdaughter Rebecca had loved—or the first she’d become aware of loving. The night Patch’s appendix burst she had been so ill, in such visible pain, lying there so white-faced and enormous-eyed with every freckle standing out; and Rebecca had been struck by fear as physical as a kick in the stomach. In some ways, she had never recovered.

Not that this lessened her irritation in the slightest when Patch said, far too loudly, “What’s Poppy trying to do: set a world record?”

“Ssh,” Rebecca told her.

He must be nearing the finish line now; he was dressing for the party. (“. . . that crackly feel of starched shirtsleeves when you slither your arms inside them . . .”) And anyhow, Rebecca was enjoying this. It was sort of like a report on what it was like to be alive, she decided. Let’s say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn’t it sound like Poppy’s speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup . . .

Why, her own report might take even longer.

Zeb was wending his way toward her with that glass of champagne, finally. The jacks players were on their eightsies.

Peter was telling J.J.J. about scientists who made discoveries in their dreams. “And if you consider how many hours we spend dreaming,” he said, “figuring, say, two hours a night, which is the national average; and say we live eighty years, and . . . let’s see, two from ten, borrow the one . . . That would give me almost seven years of dreaming.”

Maybe it was his mention of dreams, or maybe the way he was sitting—next to her but turned slightly away, so that all she saw was his profile—but Rebecca just then had the strangest thought. She thought Peter was the boy she’d been traveling with on the train. She smiled at him, even though he wasn’t looking.

Poppy was describing the candles on his cake—”a wall of flame,” he called it—and the wish he’d made before he blew them out. “I wished for an even bigger party
next
year,” he said, “to celebrate my hundred and first. My palindromic birthday.”

Several people sent Rebecca looks of sympathy.

The jacks players had reached their ninesies. Zeb placed the glass of champagne in her hands and planted a kiss on the top of her head.

There were still so many happenings yet to be hoped for in her life.

“. . . and the icing was my favorite: fondant,” Poppy was saying. “It melted in my mouth. I held a bite in my mouth and it sat for just a second and then trickled, trickled down my throat, all that melting sweetness.”

On the screen, Rebecca’s face appeared, merry and open and sunlit, and she saw that she really had been having a wonderful time.

A Note About the Author

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University, and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s fifteenth novel; her eleventh,
Breathing Lessons,
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Also by Anne Tyler

If Morning Ever Comes

The Tin Can Tree

A Slipping-Down Life

The Clock Winder

Celestial Navigation

Searching for Caleb

Earthly Possessions

Morgan’s Passing

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

The Accidental Tourist

Breathing Lessons

Saint Maybe

Ladder of Years

A Patchwork Planet

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2001 by Anne Tyler

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

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LCCN: 2001088107

eISBN: 978-0-375-41349-0

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