Ladder of Years (13 page)

“I believe my brother just uses the hand-cranked kind,” Vernon said.

“Well, if this were mine, I’d have everything under-cabinet.”

“Hand-cranked don’t take no space at all, to speak of.”

“I’d have nothing rattling around,” Delia said, “nothing interfering, so at a moment’s notice I could hop behind the wheel and go. Travel with my house on my back, like a snail. Stop when I got tired. Park in whatever campground caught my fancy.”

“Well, but campgrounds,” Vernon said. “Mostly you’d need to reserve ahead, for a campground.”

“And next morning I’d say, ‘Okay! That’s it for this place!’ And move on.”

“The rates are kind of steep too, if the campground’s halfway decent,” Vernon said. “Durn. Is that the time?”

He was looking at the clock above the sink. Delia was glad to see that the clock, at least, was attached to the wall. In her opinion, there was far too much loose and adrift here—not just the percolator but sloppily refolded newspapers and videotapes out of their boxes and cast-off pieces of clothing. “What I can’t fathom,” she said, “is how you manage to drive with these things sliding all over. Wouldn’t you have flying objects every time you hit a speed bump?”

“Not as I’ve noticed,” Vernon said. “But remember this ain’t my property. And speaking of which, my brother’s due back in like a couple of hours so I reckon I better be going.”

“I wish I could come too,” Delia said.

“Yeah. Right. Well, look, it’s been great talking with you—”

“Maybe I could just ride along for a little tiny part of the way,” Delia said.

“When—now?”

“Just to see how it handles on the road.”

“Well, it… handles fine on the road,” Vernon said. “But I’m going inland, you know? I’m nowhere near any beaches. Going down Three eighty past Ashford,
way
past Ashford, over to—”

“I’ll just ride to, um, Ashford,” Delia said.

She knew she was making him nervous. He stood staring at her, his eyebrows crinkled and his mouth slightly open, his clipboard dangling forgotten from one hand. Never mind: any moment now she would let him off the hook. She would give a little coming-to-her-senses laugh and tell him that on second thought, she couldn’t possibly ride to Ashford. She did have a family after all, and already they must be wondering where she was.

And yet here stood this van, this beautiful, completely stocked, entirely self-sufficient van that you could travel in forever, unentangled with anyone else. Oh, couldn’t she offer to buy it? How much did such things cost? Or steal it, even—shove Vernon out the door and zoom off, careening west on little back roads where no one could ever track her.

But: “Well,” she said regretfully, “I do have a family.”

“Family in Ashford? Oh, in that case,” Vernon said.

It took her a minute to understand. His eyebrows smoothed themselves out, and he leaned past her to slide the door shut. Then he flung his clipboard on the bench and said, “Long as you’ve got transportation back, then …”

Speechless, Delia made her way to the front. She sat in the passenger
seat and perched her tote bag on her knees. Next to her, Vernon was settling behind the wheel. When he switched on the ignition, the van roared to life so suddenly that she fancied it had been jittering with impatience all this time.

“Hear that?” Vernon asked her.

She nodded. She supposed it must be the engine’s vibration that caused her teeth to start chattering.

Traveling down Highway 1 toward the Maryland border, past giant beach-furniture stores and brand-new “Victorian” developments and the jumbled cafés and apartments of Fenwick Island, Delia kept telling herself that she could still get back on her own. It would mean a long walk, was all (which stretched longer moment by moment). And when they entered Ocean City, with its honky-tonk razzle-dazzle—well, Ocean City had buses, she happened to know. She could take a bus to its northernmost edge and
then
walk back. So she rode quietly, beginning to feel almost relaxed, while Vernon hunched over the wheel and steered with his forearms. He was one of those drivers who talked to traffic. “Not to pressure you or anything, fella,” he said when a car ahead of him stalled, and he clucked at four teenage boys crossing the street with their surfboards. “Aren’t
you
-all hotshots,” he told them. Delia gazed after them. The tallest boy wore ticking-striped shorts exactly like a pair Carroll owned—that voluminous new fashion that billowed to mid-knee.

When her family discovered she was gone, they would be baffled. Flummoxed. If she stayed away long enough, they would wonder if she’d met with an accident. “Or could she have left on purpose?” Sam would at last ask the children. “Did one of you say something? Did
I
say something? Was I mistaken to believe she wasn’t the type for an affair?”

An airy sense of exhilaration filled her chest. She felt so lightweight, all at once.

Then after they had had time to get really concerned, she would phone. Find a booth before night fell and, “It’s me,” she would announce. “Just took a little jaunt to the country; could one of you come pick me up?” No harm done.

So when Vernon turned onto Highway 50 and started inland (talking now about the “differential,” whatever that was), she still said nothing to stop him. The percolator clanked on the stovetop; they rattled across a bridge she’d never seen before and entered a bleached, pale country
entirely unfamiliar to her. She merely stared out the window. They passed yellowing, papery houses set in the middle of careful lawns that appeared to have been hand clipped, blade by blade. They flickered through leafy woodlands. “One place he flubbed up is not opting for a CB,” Vernon said, referring evidently to his brother, but Delia was just then picturing how Sam’s lips always formed a straight line when he was angry. And it occurred to her that what he might tell the children was, “Well, at least we can get things done right, now she’s gone.”

“Besides which you will notice there’s no stereo,” Vernon said. “That’s my brother for you: he don’t care much for music. I say there’s something lacking in a man who don’t like music.”

Maybe Eleanor would step in (speaking of doing things right). Oh, Eleanor would take over gladly—plan all the menus a year in advance and set up one of her Iron Mama budgets.

“I guess you think that’s awful,” Vernon said. “To pick fault with my own brother.”

Delia said, “No, no …”

Here and there, now, gaunt old dignified farmhouses stood at the end of long driveways, with crops growing all around them and lightning rods bristling on their rooftops. Imagine living in such a place! It would be so wholesome. Delia saw herself feeding chickens, flinging corn or wheat or whatever from her capacious country apron. First she’d have to marry a farmer, though. You always had to begin by finding some man to set things in motion, it seemed.

“But I’ll be honest,” Vernon was saying. “Me and him never have been what you’d call close. He is three years older than me and never lets me forget it. Keeps yammering about head of the family, when fact is he hardly lays eyes on our family from one month to the next.
I’m
the one takes Mom grocery shopping.
I’m
the one runs her hither and yon for her bingo nights and her covered-dish suppers and what all.”

Why did everyone maintain that men were uncommunicative? In Delia’s experience, they talked a blue streak, especially repairmen. And Sam was no exception. Sam communicated all too well, if you asked Delia.

She let her eyes follow a trailer park as they passed it. Each trailer was anchored by awnings and cinder-block steps and sometimes a screened extension. Whole menageries of plaster animals filled the little yards.

“Now, you take this fishing trip: know who’s tending his kids? Me
and Mom. Course mostly it’s Mom, but time I come home from work nights, she is so wore out the rest is up to me. But don’t expect Vincent to thank me. No, sir. And if he gets wind I drove his van, he’ll have my head.”

In her tote bag Delia had five hundred dollars of vacation money, split between her billfold and a deceptive little vinyl cosmetic kit. She could stay away overnight, if she really wanted to alarm them—take a room in some motel or even a picturesque inn. However, all she had on was her swimsuit. Oh, Lord. Her scrunchy-skirted swimsuit and her espadrilles and Sam’s beach robe. But supposing she kept the robe tightly closed … Viewed in a certain way, it was not all that different from a dress. The sleeves were three-quarter length; the hem covered her knees. And hotels around here must be used to tourists, in their skimpy tourist outfits.

They were approaching the edge of a town now. Vernon slowed for a traffic light. He was talking about his brother’s wife, Eunice. “I feel kind of sorry for her, if you really want to know,” he said. “Picture being married to Vincent!”

“What town is this?” Delia asked him.

“This? Why, Salisbury.”

The light changed, and he resumed driving. Delia was thinking that maybe she could just get out here. Maybe at the next red light. But the lights from then on were green, and also they had reached a residential section, very middle class and staid. And then beyond were unappealing malls, and messy commercial establishments, and somehow nothing struck her as very inviting.

“It’s my belief he hits her,” Vernon was saying. “Or at least, like, sort of pushes her. Anyways I know they fight a lot, because half the time when they come over she won’t look him in the face.”

They were riding through open country again, and Delia was beginning to fear she had missed her last chance. It was such
empty
country, so cardboard flat and desolate. She gripped her door handle and gazed at a naked dirt field in which violently uprooted trees lay every which way, their roots and branches clawing air. Unexpectedly Vernon braked, then took a sharp left onto a narrow paved road. “Three eighty,” he informed her. He didn’t seem to notice the clattering of the percolator behind them. “But this fishing trip they’re on is supposed to be a second honeymoon.”

“Honeymoon!” Delia said. She was looking at a pasture filled with
rusted-out cars. Around the next curve lay a ramshackle barn halfway returned to the earth—the ridgepole almost U-shaped, the warped gray boards slumping into waist-high weeds. Every minute, she saw, she was traveling farther from civilization.

“Well, how Eunice put it to my mom,” Vernon said, “she put it that her and Vincent were going off on the boat by themselves, just the two of them together.”

Delia thought that a trip alone on a fishing boat would strain the best of marriages, but all she said was, “Well, I wish them luck.”

“That’s what I told Mom,” Vernon said. He swerved around an antique tractor, whose driver was wearing what looked like a duster. “I told Mom, I said, ‘Lots of luck, when her husband is Vincent the Dweeb.’”

“She should give up on him,” Delia said, forgetting it was none of her business. “Especially if he hits her.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure he hits her.”

Was that a brick building in the distance? Yes, and a grove of dark trees that cooled and relieved Delia’s eyes, and beyond them a sparkling white steeple. She knew there must be guest accommodations here. She gathered up her tote bag and smoothed her robe around her knees.

“One time Eunice dropped by the house with a puffy place on her cheekbone,” Vernon said. “And when Mom asked where she got it she said, ‘I walked into a wall,’ which if it had been me I could have come up with a lot better story than that.”

“She should leave him,” Delia said, but her mind was on the town ahead. They were passing the outskirts now—small white houses, a diner, a collection of men talking in front of a service station. “There’s no point trying to mend a marriage that’s got to the point of violence,” she told Vernon.

Now they had reached the brick building, which turned out to be a school.
DOROTHY G. UNDERWOOD HIGH SCHOOL
. A street leading off just past that ended, evidently, in a park, for Delia glimpsed distant greenery and a statue of some kind. And now they were nearing the church that the steeple belonged to. Vernon was saying, “Well, I don’t know; maybe you’re right. Like I was telling Mom the other day, I told her—”

“I believe I’ll get out here,” Delia said.

“What?” he said. He slowed.

“Here is where I think I’ll get out.”

He brought the van to a stop and looked at the church. Two ladies
in straw hats were weeding a patch of geraniums at the foot of the announcement board. “But I thought you were going to Ashford,” he said. “
This
is not Ashford.”

“Well, still,” she said, looping the handles of her tote bag over her shoulder. She opened the passenger door and said, “Thanks for the ride.”

“I hope I didn’t say nothing to upset you,” Vernon told her.

“No! Honest! I just think I’ll—”

“Was it Eunice?”

“Eunice?”

“Vincent hitting her and all? I won’t talk about it no more if it upsets you.”

“No, really, I enjoyed our talk,” she told him. And she hopped to the ground and sent him a brilliant smile as she closed the door. She started walking briskly in the direction they had come from, and when she reached the street where she had seen the statue she turned down it, not even slowing, as if she had some specific destination in mind.

Behind her, she heard the van shift gears and roar off again. Then a deep silence fell, like the silence after some shocking remark. It seemed this town felt as stunned as Delia by what she had gone and done.

6

What kind of trees lined this street? Beeches, she believed, judging by the high, arched corridor they formed. But she had never been very good at identifying trees.

Identifying the town itself, though, was easy. First she passed an imposing old house with a sign in one ground-floor window: MIKE POTTS—“BAY BOROUGH’S FRIENDLIEST INSURANCE AGENT.” Then the Bay Borough Federal Savings Bank. And she was traveling down Bay Street, as she discovered when she reached the first intersection. But would the bay in question be the Chesapeake? She was fairly sure she had not come so far west. Also, this didn’t have the feel of a waterside town. It smelled only of asphalt.