Ladder of Years (21 page)

“Rick Rackley’s a professional athlete?”

“Or was, till his knee went. Where’ve you been living—Mars? Of course, his game was football, but believe me, the Blues are lucky to have him on their side. That’s who we’re watching, in case you didn’t know: the Blues versus the Grays. Blues are the new folks in town; Grays have been here all along. Whoops! That sounds to me like a homer.”

Another
plock!
had broken through from the southeast corner. Delia gazed upward but saw only opaque white flannel. In the outfield, such as it was (a triangle of grass behind second base), one player called to another, “Where’s it headed?”

“Damned if I know,” the second player said. Then, with a startled grunt, he caught the ball as it arrived in front of him. “Got it,” he called to the first man.

“You see it?”

“I caught it.”

“It came down already?”

“Right.”

“Bobby caught that!” the first man shouted toward home plate.

“What say?”

“He caught it,” someone relayed. “Batter’s out.”

“He’s what?”

“He’s out!”

“Where is the batter?”

“
Who
is the batter?”

Vanessa fed her son another animal cracker. “Fog on Bay Day is kind of a rule here,” she told Delia. “I don’t believe anyone’s ever once got a good look at that game. So! Delia. How do you like working for Zeke Pomfret?”

“Well … he’s okay,” Delia said. She supposed she should have expected that her job would be common knowledge.

“He’s a real fine lawyer, you know. If you decide to go ahead with your divorce, you could do worse than hire Zeke.”

Delia blinked.

“Yes, he did just great with my ex-boyfriend’s,” Belle told her. “And
he got Vanessa here’s brother Jip out of jail, when Jip hit a spell of bad luck once.”

“I haven’t given much thought to, um, divorce,” Delia said.

“Well, sure! No hurry! And anyhow, my ex-boyfriend’s case was totally different from yours.”

What did they imagine Delia’s case was? She decided not to ask.

Belle was rummaging through her big purse. She pulled forth a pale-green bottle and a stack of paper cups. “Wine?” she asked the others. “It’s a screw top. Don’t tell Polly Pomfret. Yes, Norton’s case was so straightforward, for one thing. He’d only been married a year. In fact, we met on his first anniversary. Met at a Gamblers’ Weekend Special in Atlantic City, where he’d brought his wife to celebrate. He and I just sort of … gravitated, you know?” She passed Delia a cup of white wine. “It helped that his wife was one of those people who end up soldered to their slot machines. So one-two-three I move to Bay Borough, and we rent a little apartment together, and Zeke Pomfret goes to work on Norton’s divorce.”

The wine had a metallic aftertaste, like tinned grapefruit juice. Delia cradled the cup in both hands. She said, “I’m not really planning anything that definite just yet.”

“Well, of course you’re not.”

“I’m really feeling sort of … blank right now. You know?”

“Of course you are!” both women said simultaneously.

In the square, the inning must have ended. The players they had been watching vanished and new players took shape, a new second baseman floating up by degrees and solidifying on the bench.

She dreamed Sam was driving a truck across the front lawn in Baltimore and the children were playing hide-and-seek directly in his path. They were little, though; not their present-day selves. She tried to call out and warn them, but her voice didn’t work, and they were all run over. Then Ramsay stood up again, holding his wrist, and Sam climbed out of the truck and he fell down and tried to get up again, fell down and tried to get up, and the sight made Delia feel as if a huge, ragged wound had ripped open in her chest.

When she woke, her cheeks were wet. She had thought she was starting to lose her habit of crying at night, but now tears flooded her eyes and she gave in to wrenching sobs. She was haunted by the picture of Ramsay in those little brown sandals she’d forgotten he’d ever owned.
She saw her children lined up on the lawn, still in their younger versions before they’d turned hard-shelled and spiky, before the boys had grown whiskers and Susie bought a diary with an unpickable brass lock. Those were the children she longed for.

One evening in September, she returned from work to find several envelopes bearing her name scattered across the hall floor. She knew they must be birthday cards—she was turning forty-one tomorrow—and she could tell they were from her family because of the wordy address. (
House w/ low front porch
…) The first card showed a wheelbarrow full of daisies. A
BIRTHDAY WISH
, it said, and inside,
Friendship and health / Laughter and cheer / Now and through / The coming year.
The signature was just
Ramsay
, with the tail of the y wandering off across the page in a halfhearted manner.

She carried the rest of her mail upstairs. No sense facing this in public.

Susie
, the next card was signed. (
Heartiest Congratulations and Many Happy Returns.
) And nothing at all from Carroll, though she riffled through the envelopes twice. Well, it was easy to see what had happened. These cards were Eliza’s idea. She had coaxed and cajoled the whole family into sending them. “All I’m asking,” was a phrase she would have used. Or, “No one should have to pass a birthday without …” But Carroll, the stubborn one, had flatly refused. And Sam? Delia opened his envelope next. A color photo of roses in a blue-and-white porcelain vase.
Barrels of joy / Bushels of glee
… Signed, Sam.

Then a letter from Linda, in Michigan.
I want you to know that I sincerely wish you a happy birthday
, she wrote.
I don’t hold it against you that you absconded like that even though it did mean we had to cut short our vacation which is the twin’s only chance each year to get some sense of their heritage but anyhow, have a good day.
Below her signature were Marie-Claire’s and Thérèse’s—a prim strand of copperplate and a left-hander’s gnarly crumple.

Dear Delia
, Eliza wrote, on yet another rhymed card.

We are all fine but we hope you’ll soon be home. I am taking care of the office paperwork for now, and all three kids have started back to school.

Bootsy Fisher has phoned several times and also some of the neighbors but I tell everyone you’re visiting relatives at the moment.

I hope you have a good birthday. I remember the night you were born as if it were just last week. Daddy let Linda and me wait in the waiting room with the fathers, and when the nurse came out she told us, “Congratulations, kids, you can form a singing trio now and go on Arthur Godfrey,” and that’s how we knew you were a girl. I do miss you.

Love, Eliza

Delia kept that one. The others she discarded. Then she decided she might as well discard Eliza’s too. Afterward she sat on her bed a long while, pressing her fingertips to her lips.

On her actual birthday, a package arrived from Sam’s mother. It was roughly the size of a book, too thick to fit through the mail slot, so it stood inside the screen door, where Delia found it when she came home. She groaned when she recognized the writing. Eleanor was known for her extremely practical gifts—a metric-conversion tape measure, say, or a battery recharger, always wrapped in wrinkled paper saved from Christmas. This time, as Delia discovered when she took the package upstairs, it was a miniature reading light on a neck cord. Well, in fact …, she reflected. It would probably work much better than her lamp. She tucked it under her pillow, next to her stash of toilet paper.

There was a letter too, on Eleanor’s plain buff stationery:

Dear Delia
,

This is just a little something I thought you might find helpful. On the few occasions when I’ve traveled myself, the reading light has generally been miserable. Perhaps you’re having the same experience. If not, just pass this along to your favorite charity. (Lately I’ve been most dissatisfied with Goodwill but continue to feel that Retarded Citizens is a worthwhile organization.)

My best wishes for your birthday.

Love, Eleanor

Delia flipped it over, but all she found on the back was RECYCLED PAPER RECYCLED PAPER RECYCLED PAPER running across the bottom. She had expected indignation, or at least a few reproaches.

She remembered how, when she and Sam were first engaged, she had entertained such high hopes for Eleanor. She had thought she was finally getting a mother of her own. But that was before they met. Eleanor came to supper at the Felsons’, arriving directly from the Home for Wayward Girls, where she volunteered as a typing teacher twice a week. Once the introductions were over, she hardly gave Delia a glance. All she talked about was the terrible, terrible poverty endured by the wayward girls and the staggering contrast of this meal—which, by the way, was merely pot roast sprinkled with onion-soup mix and an iceberg lettuce salad. “I asked this one poor child,” Eleanor said, “I asked, ‘Dear, could your people buy you a typewriter so you could work from your house after the baby arrives?’ And she said, ‘Miss, my family’s so poor they can’t even afford shampoo.’” A basket of rolls appeared before her. Eleanor gazed into it, looking puzzled, and passed it on. “I don’t know what made her choose that example, of all things,” she said. “Shampoo.”

(Why was it that so many voices came wafting back to Delia these days? Sometimes as she fell asleep she heard them nattering on without her, as if everybody she’d ever known sat around her, conversing. Like people in a sickroom, she thought. Like people at a deathbed.)

Another present Eleanor had once given her was a tiny electric steamer gadget to freshen clothes during trips. This was some years back; Delia couldn’t remember what she’d done with it. But the thing was, here in Bay Borough she could have put it to use. She could have touched up her office dresses, both of which had grown somewhat puckery at the seams after repeated hand laundering. It would certainly have been preferable to buying an iron and ironing board. Oh, why hadn’t she kept the steamer? Why hadn’t she brought it with her? How could she have been so shortsighted, and so ungrateful?

She didn’t answer any of the birthday cards, but etiquette demanded a thank-you note to Eleanor.
The little light is very convenient
, she wrote.
Much better than the goosenecked lamp I’ve been reading by up till now. So I’ve moved the lamp to the bureau which means I don’t have to use the ceiling bulb and therefore the room looks much softer.
In this manner she contrived to cover the entire writing area of a U.S. postcard without really saying anything at all.

The next morning, while she was dropping the card in the mailbox near the office, she was suddenly struck by the fact that Eleanor had
once worked in an office. She had put her son through college on a high-school secretary’s salary—no small feat, as Delia could now appreciate. She wished she had thought to mention her job in her thank-you note. But maybe Eliza had said something. “Delia’s employed by a lawyer,” Eliza might have said. “She handles every detail for him. You should see her all dressed up for work; if you met her on the street, you wouldn’t know her.”

“Is that so?” Sam would ask. (Somehow, the listener had changed from Eleanor to Sam.) “Handles everything, you say. Not mislaying important files? Not lounging around the waiting room, reading trashy novels?”

Well, she’d spent more than half her life trying to win Sam’s approval. She supposed she couldn’t expect to break a habit like that overnight.

October came, and the weather grew cooler. The square filled up with yellow leaves. Some nights, Delia had to shut her windows. She bought a flannel nightgown and two long-sleeved dresses—one gray pinstripe, one forest green—and she started keeping an eye out for a good secondhand coat. It was not yet cold enough for a coat, but she wanted to be prepared.

On rainy days, now, she ate lunch at the Cue Stick ‘n’ Cola on Bay Street. She ordered coffee and a sandwich and watched the action at the one pool table. Vanessa often wheeled her stroller in to join her. While Greggie lurched among the chair legs like a brightly colored top, Vanessa would offer Delia thumbnail sketches of the players. “See the guy breaking? Buck Baxter. Moved here eight or ten years ago. Baxter as in Baxter Janitorial Supplies, but they say his father’s disowned him. No, Greggie, the man doesn’t want your cookie. Now, her I don’t know,” she said. She meant the diminutive, dark-haired young woman who was leaning across the pool table to shoot on tiptoe, her purple canvas pocketbook still slung over her shoulder. “Must be from outside. Leave him alone, Greggie. And the fellow in the cowboy boots, that’s Belle’s ex-boyfriend, Norton Grove. Belle was out of her mind to fall for him. Fickle? That man put fickle in the dictionary.”

Delia was gathering an impression of Bay Borough as a town of misfits. Almost everybody here had run away from someplace else, or been run away
from
. And no longer did it seem so idyllic. Rick and Teensy Rackley were treated very coolly by some of the older citizens; the only two gay
men she knew of seemed to walk about with no one but each other; there was talk of serious drug use in the consolidated high school; and Mr. Pomfret’s appointment book was crammed with people feuding over property lines and challenging drunk-driving arrests.

Still, she felt contented here. She had her comfortable routine, her niche in the general scheme of things. Making her way from office to library, from library to café, she thought that her exterior self was instructing her interior self, much like someone closing his eyes and mimicking sleep in order to persuade sleep to come. It was not that her sadness had left her, but she seemed to operate on a smooth surface several inches above the sadness. She deposited her check each Saturday; she dined each Sunday at the Bay Arms Restaurant. People nodded now when they saw her, which she took not just for greeting but for confirmation:
Ah, yes, there’s Miss Grinstead, exactly where she belongs.