Ladder of Years (12 page)

“No, I have to wind down gradually,” he told her. He started walking in circles around the blanket, stopping every now and then to bend over and grip his kneecaps. Drops of sweat fell from his forehead to the sand. “What have we got to drink?” he asked her.

“Lemonade, Pepsi, iced tea—”

“Iced tea sounds good.”

She stood to fill a paper cup and hand it to him. He was no longer breathing so hard, at least. He drained the cup in a single draft and set it on the lid of the cooler. “Your nose is burning,” he told her.

“I want to get a
little
tan.”

“Melanoma is what you’re going to get.”

“Well, maybe after lunch I’ll put on some—”

But he had already picked up Linda’s bottle of sunblock. “Hold still,” he said, unscrewing the cap. He started smoothing lotion across her face. It smelled like bruised peaches, an artificial, trashy smell that made her wrinkle her nose. “Turn around and I’ll do your back,” he told her.

Obediently, she turned. She faced inland now, where the roofs of cottages hulked beyond the sand fence. A flock of tiny dark birds crossed the blue sky in the distance, keeping a perfectly triangular formation so that they seemed connected by invisible wires. They swung around and caught the sun, and suddenly they were white, in fact almost silver, like a veil of sequins; and then they swung again, and once more they were
plain black specks. Sam smoothed lotion over Delia’s shoulders. It went on warm but cooled in the breeze, tingling slightly.

“Delia,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“I was wondering about the old woman who came by the house Saturday night.”

She grew still beneath his palm, but she felt that every one of her nerves was thrumming like a twanged string.

“I know she was, maybe, peculiar,” he said. “But she had an actual photograph, and she seemed to think it really did show you and that who’s-it, that what’s-his-name …”

She had already turned toward him to deny it when he said, “That Adrian Fried Rice.”

“Bly-Brice,” she said.

For he had twisted the name on purpose. He always did that. The maid of honor at their wedding, Missy Pringle, he had kept referring to as Prissy Mingle. It was just like him to be so belittling! So contemptuous of her friends, with that ironic glint to his voice! Her entire marriage unrolled itself before her: ancient hurts and humiliations and resentments, theoretically forgotten but just waiting to revive at moments such as this.

“His name is Adrian, Bly, Brice,” she told him.

“I see,” Sam said. His face had a sheeted look.

“But that woman got it all wrong. He’s nothing but an acquaintance.”

“I see.”

In silence, he replaced the bottle of sunblock.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I never said that.”

“No, but you implied it.”

“I surely can’t be blamed for what you imagine I might have implied,” Sam said. “Of course he’s just an acquaintance. You’re not exactly the type to have an affair. But I’m wondering how it seems to outsiders, Dee. You know?”

“No, I don’t know,” she said, between set teeth. “And my name is not
Dee.
”

“All right,” he said. “Delia. Now, why don’t you just calm down.”

And he leveled the air between them with both palms, in that patronizing gesture she always found so infuriating, and turned away from her and walked toward the water.

Every quarrel they had ever had, he had walked off before it was
resolved. He would get her all riled up and then loftily remove himself, giving the impression that he, at least, could behave like an adult. Adult? Old man was more the case. Who else would wade into the surf in his sneakers? Who else would pat water so fastidiously on his chest and upper arms before ducking under? And check his watch, for Lord’s sake, when he rose? To Delia it seemed he was timing the waves, engaging in some precise and picky ritual that filled her with irritation.

She snatched her tote bag from the blanket, spun on one bare heel, and stamped off down the beach.

More people had arrived without her noticing. Only a slender path wound among the umbrellas and canvas chairs and mesh playpens, and so after a few yards she changed course till she was marching alongside the ocean, on wet, packed sand that cooled the soles of her feet.

This part of the beach belonged to the walkers. They walked in twos, mostly: young couples, old couples, almost always holding hands or at least matching their strides. From time to time small children cut in front of them. Delia pictured a map of the entire East Coast from Nova Scotia to Florida—an irregular strip of beige sand dotted with tiny humans, a wash of blue Atlantic next to it even more sparsely dotted. She herself was a dot in motion, heading south. She would keep going till she fell off the bottom of the continent, she decided. By and by Sam would think to ask, “Have you seen Delia?” “Why, no, where could she have got to?” the others would say, but she would keep on the move, like someone running between raindrops, and they would never, ever find her.

Already, though, something was slowing her down. The first of the Sea Colony condominiums towered ahead—ugly Sea Colony with its impassive monochrome high-rises, like a settlement from an alien galaxy. She could have made her way past, but that mysterious, Star Wars hum that the buildings always emitted chilled her so that she stopped short. In her childhood, this had been grassy marshland, with a few plain-faced cottages scattered about. In her childhood, she was almost certain, she and her father had flown homemade kites right where that complex of orange plastic pyramids now shaded a modernistic sundeck. For an instant she could feel her father’s blunt fingers closing over hers on the kite string. She brushed a hand across her eyes. Then she turned and started walking back.

A lifeguard slouched on his chair, surveying the bathers inscrutably from behind his dark glasses. A lardy young boy on a raft landed in the
foam at Delia’s feet. She stepped around him and, looking ahead, spotted her family’s green-and-white umbrella and her children on their blanket just beyond. They were sitting up now, and Sam stood some distance away, still shiny after his swim. From here it didn’t seem that anyone was speaking, for the children faced the horizon and Sam was studying his watch.

Just that abruptly, Delia veered inland. She left the ocean behind and picked her way around sand tunnels and forts and collections of toys. When she had traversed the wooden walkway to the road, she stopped to dust her feet off and dig her espadrilles from her tote. Sam’s beach robe lay beneath them—a wad of navy broadcloth—and after a moment’s consideration, she shook it out and put it on. Her shoulders were so burned by now that they seemed to give off heat.

If she had thought to get the car keys from Ramsay, she could have driven. She wasn’t looking forward to that trek to the cottage. In fact, she could return for the keys right now. But then some of the others might want to come with her, and so she decided against it.

Already the ocean seemed far away and long ago, a mere whisper on this sunny paved road with its silent cottages and empty, baking automobiles and motionless rows of swimsuits on clotheslines. She cut through someone’s backyard—mostly sand—and circled an enclosure of garbage cans that smelled of crab and buzzed with glittery blue flies. Then she was facing Highway 1. Traffic whizzed by so fast that she had to wait several minutes before she could cross.

On the other side of the highway, her footsteps were the loudest sound around—her stiff straw soles clopping out a rhythm. Perhaps because she’d been thinking of her father, the rhythm seemed to keep time with the song he used to sing when she was small. She stalked past screened porches, with her shoes beating out “Delia’s Gone”—asking where she’d been so long, saying her lover couldn’t sleep, saying all around his bed at night he kept hearing little Delia’s bare feet. She especially liked that last line; she always had. Except, wasn’t the other Delia dead? Yes, obviously: there was mention in the very first verse of little Delia dead and gone. But she preferred to believe the woman had simply walked out. It was more satisfying that way.

Her face felt sticky, and her shoulder hurt where the handles of her tote bag chafed her sunburn. She switched the tote to her other side. She was almost there now, anyhow. She was planning on a tall iced tea as soon as she stepped through the door, and after that a cool bath and
a little private visit with her cat. It was time to lure Vernon from under her bed, where he had taken up residence at some point during the night. In fact, maybe she ought to do that first.

She smiled at a woman carrying a suitcase out of the cottage next to theirs. “Lovely beach weather!” the woman called. “Hate to leave it!”

“It’s perfect,” Delia said, and she rounded a van parked in the driveway and climbed her own steps.

Inside, the dimness turned her momentarily blind. She peered up the stairwell and called, “Vernon?”

“What.”

She gasped.

“Somebody page me?” a man’s voice asked.

He lumbered down the stairs—a chubby young man with a clipboard, dressed in jeans and a red plaid shirt. His moon-shaped face, with its round pink cheeks and nubbin nose and buttonhole mouth, reassured her somewhat, but even so she could barely draw breath to ask, “Who …?”

“I’m Vernon, didn’t you holler my name? I’m here about the roof.”

“Oh,” she said. She gave a shaky laugh and clutched her tote bag to her chest. “I was just calling my cat,” she told him.

“Well, I haven’t seen no cat about. Sorry if I scared you.”

“You didn’t scare me!”

He squinted at her doubtfully. The satiny skin beneath his eyes glistened with sweat, which made him look earnest and boyish. “Anyhow,” he said. “Seems I’ll need to replace that flashing up top round the chimney. I won’t be doing it today, though; I got to get on back. So if those folks at the realtor’s phone, tell them I’ll be in touch, okay?”

“Okay,” Delia said.

He waved his clipboard amiably and headed past her out the door. On the steps, he turned and asked, “How you like my vehicle?”

“Vehicle?”

“Ain’t it something?”

It was, in fact. She wondered how she could have missed it. Big as a house trailer, painted a metallic bronze with a desert landscape lighting up one side, it occupied the whole driveway. “Got a microwave,” Vernon was saying, “got a dinky little ’frigerator—”

“You mean it’s for living in?”

“Sure, what else?”

“I thought vans would just have rows and rows of seats.”

“Ain’t you ever been inside a RV before? Shoot, come on and I’ll show you.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I—”

“Come on! This’ll knock your socks off.”

“Well, maybe I
will
take a peek,” Delia said, and she followed him, still hugging her tote bag. One section of the desert scene proved to be a sliding panel. Vernon slid it open and stood back to let her see inside. When she poked her head in she found gold shag carpeting halfway up the walls, and built-in cabinets, and a platform bed at the rear with storage drawers underneath. Two high-backed seats faced the windshield—the only sign that this was, after all, a means of transportation.

“Gosh,” Delia said.

“Climb in. Get a load of my entertainment center.”

“You have an entertainment center?”

“State of the art,” he told her. He climbed in himself, causing the van to tilt beneath his weight, and then turned to offer a hand as big as a baseball glove. She accepted it and clambered inside. The oily, exciting smell of new carpet reminded her of airports and travel.

“Ta-daah!” Vernon said. He flung open a cabinet. “What it is,” he said, “in the bottom of this here TV is a slot for a videotape, see? Integrated VCR. Evenings, I just swivel it out and watch the latest hit movies from the bed.”

“You stay here all the time?”

“Just about,” he said. “Well, more or less. Well, for now I do.” Then he sent her a look, with his head ducked. “I’ll tell you the honest truth,” he said. “This van belongs to my brother.”

He seemed to think the news would disappoint her deeply. He fixed her with a worried blue gaze and waited, scarcely breathing, until she said, “Oh, really?”

“I guess I kind of gave the impression it was mine,” he said. “But see, my brother’s off on this fishing trip, him and his wife. Left his van at our mom’s house in Nanticoke Landing. Told her to watch over it and not let nobody drive it. Me is who he meant. But he’s due back this afternoon and so yesterday I got to thinking. ‘Well, durn,’ I got to thinking. ‘Here’s this fully equipped RV, been setting in Mom’s yard all week and I have not so much as tried that little microwave.’ So last night I stayed in it, and this morning I took it out to make my estimates. Mom said she don’t even want to know about it. Said not to drag her into it.
But what can he do to me, right? What’s he going to do to me—haul me off to jail?”

“Maybe he won’t find out,” Delia said.

“Oh, he’ll find out, all right. Be just like him to have wrote down the mileage before he left,” Vernon told her gloomily.

“You could always say you thought the battery needed charging.”

“Battery. Sure.”

“Does he live here? In the van, I mean?”

“Naw.”

“Well, I would,” Delia said. She bent to raise the seat of an upholstered bench. Just as she had expected, there was storage space underneath. She glimpsed woolens of some kind—blankets or jackets. “I would make it my year-round home,” she said. “Really! Who needs a big old house and all those extra rooms?”

“Yeah, but my brother’s got three kids,” Vernon said.

“Have you ever seen those under-cabinet coffeemakers?” Delia asked him.

“Huh?”

She was inspecting the kitchen area now. It was a model of miniaturization, with a sink the size of a salad bowl and a two-burner stovetop. A dented metal percolator stood on one of the burners. “They have these coffeepots,” she told Vernon, “that you permanently install beneath the overhang of a cabinet. So you don’t waste any space.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Actually, there’s a whole line of under-cabinet equipment. Toaster ovens, can openers … electric can opener you install beneath the—”