Ladder of Years (14 page)

She found her explanation in the square. There, where scanty blades of grass struggled with plantain beneath more trees, a plaque at the base of the single bronze statue proclaimed:

ON THIS SPOT, IN AUGUST 1863,
GEORGE PENDLE BAY,
A UNION SOLDIER ENCAMPED OVERNIGHT WITH HIS COMPANY,
DREAMED THAT A MIGHTY ANGEL APPEARED TO HIM AND SAID,
“YE ARE SITTING IN THE BARBER’S CHAIR OF INFINITY,”
WHICH HE INTERPRETED AS INSTRUCTION
TO ABSENT HIMSELF FROM THE REMAINDER OF THE WAR
AND STAY ON TO FOUND THIS TOWNSHIP.

Delia blinked and took a step backward. Mr. Bay, a round-faced man in a bulging suit, did happen to be sitting, but his chair was the ordinary, non-barber kind, as near as she could make out, with a skirt of twisted bronze fringe. He gripped the chair’s arms in a manner that squashed his fingertips; evidently he had been a nail biter. This struck Delia as comical. She gave a snuffle of laughter and then glanced over her shoulder, fearing someone had heard. But the square was empty, its four green benches uninhabited. Around the perimeter, cars cruised past, one or two at a time, and people walked in and out of the low brick and clapboard buildings, but nobody seemed to notice her.

Still, she was conscious all at once of her outfit. It wasn’t so much the beach robe as the swimsuit underneath, the
feeling
of it, crumpled and bunchy and saggy. She’d give anything for some underwear. So she crossed the little square and gazed toward the row of storefronts on the other side of the street.

Clearly, modern times had overtaken the town. Buildings that must have been standing for a century—the bricks worn down like old pencil erasers, the clapboards gently rubbed to gray wood—now held the Wild Applause Video Shop, Tricia’s House of Hair, and a Potpourri Palace. One place that seemed unchanged, though, was the dime store on the corner, with its curlicued red-and-gilt sign and a window full of flags and bunting.

She had been taught to buy only top-quality underwear, however else she might economize, but this was an emergency. She crossed the street and entered the dime-store smells of caramel and cheap cosmetics and old wooden floors. Apparently the notion of consolidated checkout lanes had not caught on here. At each and every counter, a clerk stood by a cash register. A floss-haired girl rang up a coloring book for a child; an elderly woman bagged a younger woman’s cookie sheets. The lingerie department was staffed by a man, oddly enough; so Delia made her selections in haste and handed them over without quite raising her eyes. A plain white nylon bra, white cotton underpants. The underpants came three to a pack. Other styles could be purchased singly, but it was the pack of three that her fingers alighted on.
Just in case I’m away for more than one night
, she caught herself thinking. Then, as she counted out
her money, she thought,
But I can always use them at home, of course, too. This doesn’t mean a thing.

Now she had her underclothes but no place to get into them, for she didn’t see a rest room in the dime store. She went back outside, tucking her parcel into her tote, and looked up the street. Next door was Debbi’s Dress Shoppe. Nineteen-forties mannequins with painted-on hair sported the latest fashions—broad-shouldered business suits or linen sheaths shaped like upside-down triangles. Not Delia’s style at all, but at least she would find a changing booth here. She breezed in, trying to look purposeful, and snatched the nearest dress off a rack and hurried toward a row of compartments at the rear. “May I help you?” a woman called after her, but Delia said, “Oh, thanks, I’m only …” and disappeared behind a curtain.

The underwear fit, thank heaven. (She did her best to silence the rustling of the bag.) It was a relief to feel
contained
again. She folded her swimsuit into her tote. Then she reached for Sam’s robe, but the sight of it gave her pause. It seemed so obviously a beach robe, all at once. She looked toward the dress she’d snatched up—a gray knit of some sort. Way too long, she could tell at a glance, but still she slipped it off its hanger and drew it over her head. The acrid smell of new fabric engulfed her. She smoothed down the skirt, zipped the side zipper, and turned to confront her reflection.

She had assumed she would resemble a child playing dress-up, for the hem nearly brushed her ankles. What she found, though, was someone entirely unexpected: a somber, serious-minded woman in a slender column of pearl gray. She might be a librarian or a secretary, one of those managerial executive secretaries who actually run the whole office from behind the scenes. “You’ll find it in the Jones file, Mr. Smith,” she imagined herself saying curtly. “And don’t forget you’re lunching with the mayor today; you’ll want to take along the materials on the—”

“How’re we doing in there?” the saleswoman called.

“Oh, fine.”

“Can I bring you anything else to try?”

“No,” Delia said. “This is perfect.”

She stuffed Sam’s robe into her tote and emerged from the booth to ask, “Could you just take the tags off, please? I think I’ll wear it home.”

The saleswoman—an overtanned blond in a geometric black-and-white print—directed a dubious frown toward the hemline. “We do offer alterations,” she said. “Would you like that shortened a bit?”

“No, thanks,” Delia told her in a starchy, secretarial voice.

The saleswoman adjusted seamlessly. “Well, it certainly becomes you,” she said.

Delia raised her left arm, and the woman reached for her scissors and snipped off the tags that dangled from the zipper pull.

Seventy-nine ninety-five, the dress cost, not including tax. But Delia paid without a moment’s hesitation and strode out of the shop.

The momentum of her exit carried her some distance, past the dime store again and across an intersection to a row of smaller shops—a copy center, a travel agent, a florist. She noticed she walked differently now, not with her usual bouncy gait but more levelly, because of her slim skirt.
Here is the secretary, Miss X, speeding back to her office after lunch. Preparing to type up her notes for the board of directors.

Just as a game, she started choosing her office, the same way she used to choose her house when riding through a posh neighborhood.
NICHOLS & TRIMBLE FAMILY DENTISTS
. But there she might have to clean teeth or something.
VALUE VISION OPTICIANS
. But did opticians use secretaries?
EZEKIEL POMFRET, ATTORNEY
. Possibly defunct, from the expressionless look of the lowered window shade. And none of these places bore a
HELP WANTED
sign. Not that that made any practical difference.

At the next intersection, she took a left. She passed a pet supply and an antique store, so called (its window full of Fiesta ware and aqua plastic ashtrays shaped like boomerangs). A pharmacy. Two frame houses. A mom-and-pop grocery. Then another frame house, set so close to the street that its porch floor seemed an extension of the sidewalk. Propped in the dusty front window stood a cardboard notice,
ROOM FOR RENT
, bracketed by limp gauze curtains.

Room for rent.

This would be, of course, a “boardinghouse.” The word summoned a picture of the secretary tidying the covers on her spinsterly white bed; her fellow boarders shuffling down the hall in their carpet slippers; her ancient landlady, dressed in black, setting the dining-room table—the “board”—for tomorrow’s breakfast. In the time it took Delia to cross the porch and ring the bell, she became so well entrenched that she hardly felt the need to introduce herself to the woman who appeared at the door. “Well, hi!” the woman said. “Can I help you?”

She didn’t fit Delia’s vision of a landlady. She was plump and fortyish, heavily rouged, wearing a towering dessert tray of lavish golden curls and
a hot-pink pantsuit. Still, she seemed to be the one in charge, so Delia said, “I’m inquiring about the room.”

“Room?”

“The room for rent,” Delia reminded her.

“Oh, the room,” the woman said. “Well. I was hoping to rent to a man.”

Was that even legal, nowadays? Delia didn’t know what to say next.

“Up to last April,” the woman told her, opening the baggy screen door, “I just always had men. It just always seemed to work that way. I only rent out two rooms, you know, and so I had these two men, Mr. Lamb who travels weekdays and Larry Watts who was separated. But when Larry got back with his wife last April, why, I rented his room to a woman. And did I ever regret it!”

She turned, leaving the door to Delia, and started up a flight of stairs. Uncertainly, Delia followed. She had an impression of a house that had long ago been abandoned. Ovals of lighter wallpaper showed where pictures must once have hung, and the floorboards of the upstairs hall revealed the ghost of a rug.

“Katie O’Connell, her name was,” the woman said. Even so short a climb had winded her. She patted her wide pink bosom with little spanking sounds. “A Delaware girl, I believe. She came to town to work for Zeke Pomfret—Zeke had just had his dear old Miss Percy
die
on him—and so Katie needed a place to stay and I said, ‘Fine,’ not having the slightest inkling: ‘Fine,’ I told her, thinking this would be no different from renting to a man. But, oh, it was, ‘Where’s this, where’s that, where’s my fresh towels daily, where’s my little bar of soap …?’ I am not a bed-and-breakfast, mind you. I hope you don’t think I’m a bed-and-breakfast.”

“Of course not,” Delia said.

“I’m only renting out rooms, you know? I bought this place three years ago. Fixer-upper, they called it. I bought it after I passed my real estate exam, thought I’d fix it up and sell it, but the way the market’s been doing I just never have found the money for that, and so I’m living here myself and renting out two of the rooms. But there’s no meals involved; I hope you’re not looking for meals. This Katie, she was, ‘Oh, let me just keep this quart of milk in your fridge,’ and not two shakes later she was cooking in my kitchen. Why,
I
don’t even cook in my kitchen! This is a bare-bones operation.”

Proving it, she opened the door to the right of the stairs. Delia followed
her into a long, narrow room, its outside wall slanting inward under the eaves, a window at each end. A metal cot extended from beneath the front window, and a low, orange-brown bureau sat against the inside wall. There was a smell like a hornet’s nest—a dry, sharp, moldering smell that came, perhaps, from the brittle-looking tan wallpaper traced with mottled roses.

“Now, Katie had drapes on these windows,” the woman said, “but she took them when she left. Left last Thursday with Larry Watts; we think they went to Hawaii.”

“The … Larry Watts who was separated?” Delia asked in confusion.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you knew him. Yes, once I put it all together, I recalled he did come back for his raincoat—raincoat he’d left in the downstairs closet. That must be how they met. Next thing anyone knows, he’s flown the coop, leaving that little wife of his for the second time in two years. Not to mention Zeke Pomfret needing to hunt up a whole new girl now, so soon after losing poor Miss Percy.”

She flung open a door at the rear, exposing a shallow closet. Three hangers tinkled faintly. “Bathroom’s off the hall, full bath with tub and shower,” she said, “and you wouldn’t have to share it but on weekends, when Mr. Lamb gets back from his sales trips. I stay downstairs, myself. Rent is forty-two dollars a week. You want it?”

Forty-two dollars was less than a single night in most hotels. And a hotel would not be anything like so satisfyingly Spartan. Delia said, “You mean it’s all right I’m not a man?”

The woman shrugged. “No one
else
has come along,” she said.

Delia walked over to the cot, which was made up with white sheets and a white woolen blanket washed bald. When she tested the mattress with one palm, it sounded the same tinny note as the hangers.

She said, “Definitely I want it.”

“Well, great. I’m Belle Flint, by the way.”

“I’m Delia Grinstead,” Delia said, and then she wondered if she should have used an alias. But Belle seemed reassuringly uninterested. She was fluffing her curls now in the mirror over the bureau. “So,” Delia said, “would I have to … sign a contract?”

“Contract?”

“I mean …”

It must be painfully apparent that she had never arranged for her own housing before. “I mean a … lease or something?” she asked.

“Lord, no, just pay in advance, every Saturday morning,” Belle said,
baring her front teeth to the mirror. “Let’s see. Today’s Monday. … Pay me thirty dollars; that’ll cover this week. You plan on staying here long?”

“Oh, maybe,” Delia said, deliberately vague, and she started making a to-do over digging through her tote. Belle was tilting her chin now to study the cushion of flesh beneath it. Her entire face was a cushion; she resembled one of those lush, soft flowers, a peony or a big floppy iris.

“Well, here,” Delia told her, “ten, twenty …,” and only then did Belle turn away from the mirror. If she was surprised to receive cash, she didn’t show it. She folded the bills and tucked them into her breast pocket.

“I guess you’ll want to go fetch your belongings,” she said, “and meantime I’ll put your key on the bureau, just in case I’m out when you get back. I’m showing a house at four-thirty. You won’t be bringing a lot of
stuff
, I hope.”

“No, I—”

“Because this room doesn’t have much storage space, and I hate for things to spill over. That’s how all that happened with Larry Watts and Katie: his raincoat spilled into the downstairs closet, and so naturally he forgot it when he moved.”

“I’m bringing very little,” Delia said.

She would wait to come back till, say, five o’clock, when Belle was sure to be out. That way Belle wouldn’t see she was really bringing nothing. It was now … Surreptitiously, she checked her watch. Three forty-five. Belle was clattering out of the room in her wedge-heeled sandals. “Rules are, the first floor is mine,” she said, pausing in the hall, “and that includes the kitchen. Café across the street is pretty good: Rick-Rack’s. There’s a laundromat on East Street, and Mrs. Auburn comes Fridays to clean the rooms. We never lock the front door, but that key to your room does work, if you’re the nervous type. You got all that?”