Ladder of Years (35 page)

“Oh, God, we have to get you to a doctor,” Ellie said.

“I don’t need a doctor; goodness.”

“You’re no judge of that! You’re not in your right mind,” Ellie said. Although it was Ellie who seemed unhinged, thrusting more handfuls of tissues at her (did she carry them loose in her pockets, or what?) and shrilly ordering the others about. “Move! Give us room. Noah, you ride in back; we’ll put Delia up in front.”

“Isn’t there a school nurse or something? Why don’t we look for the nurse?” Delia asked.

But Ellie said, “You don’t want to end up with a scar, do you? An ugly, disfiguring scar?”

Which was something to consider; so Delia allowed herself to be shepherded toward the front seat. Noah, who had folded the seat forward so he could climb into the rear, straightened it for Delia. When she was settled, he leaned over her shoulder to offer her a gray sweatshirt from his knapsack. “Here,” he said. “You’re going through those hankies like a spigot.”

She would have argued (blood was so hard to launder), but it was true she had used up the tissues. She pressed the sweatshirt to her forehead and breathed in its smell of clean sweat and gym shoes. Meanwhile Ellie slid behind the wheel and started the engine. “You’ll probably need stitches,” she said, pulling into traffic. “Oh, lately it seems everything I touch goes galloping off in every direction! Leaves me staring after it amazed!”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Delia told her. She took a peek from under the sweatshirt. Up close, Ellie seemed more likable. Her lipstick was worn to a tired outline, and her eyes sagged slightly at the outer corners.

“I’m not myself these days,” Ellie said. “You hear people say that all the time, but up till now I’d assumed it was a figure of speech. Now I stand off to one side looking at myself like a whole other person, and I ask, ‘What could she be
thinking
of?’”

They turned left, onto Weber Street. Delia folded the sweatshirt to a new section. She was beginning to understand why you often saw red roses planted near gray stone walls. The bloodstains looked so vivid against the sweatshirt fabric, she would have liked to show the others. But Ellie was still talking away. “I admit it was me who walked out on the marriage,” she said. (Delia replayed the last few sentences, wondering if she had missed some key transition.) “You don’t have to remind me! I started
picturing how I’d get to heaven and God would say, ‘Such a waste; I sent you into the world and you didn’t even make use of it, just sat there in one spot complaining you were bored.’ So I walked out. But when I saw you at the wedding, when I saw how—well, I guess I thought you’d be older and fatter and wearing a zip-front dress or something. I know I made a scene, phoning Joel like I did. …”

Ellie had phoned Joel?

“In fact I watched myself dialing, and I said, ‘What a dumb thing to do!’ But I went right on doing it. And I’d planned to be Madam Iceberg. ‘I’ve been thinking, Joel,’ I’d say. ‘Perhaps you should grant me custody, now you’ve got a female companion.’ But I guess he told you how it came out. I hear his voice, I’m like a woman possessed. ‘How dare you do this to Noah! Exposing an innocent child to that tawdry little love nest you’ve set up!’”

Love nest! Delia was thrilled.

“And if that wasn’t bad enough, then I go and drag Noah in too. I’m sorry, honey!” Ellie said, addressing the rearview mirror. But she didn’t wait for Noah’s reaction. “And you know how heartless kids can be. The minute you show you’re upset, they pretend you don’t exist. They stare right through you. They make up all these excuses why they can’t come and visit you.”

“Mom,” Noah said.

Delia was curious to hear how he would handle this, but all he said was, “Mom, you just passed Dr. Norman’s.”

“Yes, I know,” Ellie said. They were on Border Street now, heading toward Highway 380. “Every morning I’d wake up saying, ‘Today I’ll get ahold of myself. I’ll just put it out of my mind,’ I’d say, but there you were, regardless: this mystery woman no one knew a thing about, the very type Joel would fall for. I bet you speak perfect English too, don’t you?”

“You have it all wrong,” Delia said, much as she hated to. “It’s not the way you—”

But Ellie was turning north on 380, and Noah broke in to ask, “Mom? Where you going?”

“There are scads of doctors in Easton,” Ellie said.

“Easton!” Noah and Delia said together.

“Well, you surely don’t think we could use Dr. Norman. He’s right there in town! Anybody in town will believe I did this on purpose.”

“Can’t we just tell him you didn’t?” Delia asked.

“Ha! You don’t know Bay Borough like I do. People there make a scandal out of the simplest little trifle.”

“Maybe a drugstore, then,” Delia said. She was beginning to feel uneasy. “All I need is a bandage.”

“Oh, Delia, Delia, Delia,” Ellie said. “You are so naive. Sure as you live, the pharmacist would be some Underwood graduate who couldn’t wait to get on the phone and start blabbing. ‘Guess what!’” she mimicked. “‘Mr. Miller’s demented wife tried to murder his girlfriend.’”

“I’m not his—”

“I bet
you
never say ‘share,’ do you?”

“Share?”

“As in communicate. As in, ‘So-and-so shared his feelings with me.’ Joel used to gnash his teeth when I said that. And he had this thing about putting in the objects of my verbs. ‘Enjoy
what
?’ he’d ask me. Or, ‘Take care of
whom
? Where’s the end of your sentence, Ellie?’”

Delia watched a field of dead autos slide past. In back, Noah was silent.

“Funny how men always worry ahead of time that marriage might confine them,” Ellie said. “Women don’t give it a thought. It’s afterwards it hits them. Stuck for life! Imprisoned! Trapped forever with a man who won’t let you say ‘parenting.’”

She braked; they had reached the stoplight at Highway 50. While they waited for it to turn green, she started digging through her purse. “Do you have any cash?” she asked Delia. “I don’t want to pay with a check. Even over in Easton, my name might ring a bell.”

She was crazy, Delia decided. So far she had been able to see Ellie’s side of things—had sympathized, even. But now she had a sense of panic. And besides that, her cut was starting to hurt. She imagined she could actually feel its widening mouth, the edges hardening into a permanent scar.

They would have to make a run for it, as soon as she could safely snatch Noah out of the back. Maybe when they got to the doctor’s.
If
they got to the doctor’s; for here they sat, on and on, at this eternal red light. “Green light, green light,” she urged. She leaned forward, as if that would hurry things.

Ellie, misunderstanding, said, “Oh, sorry,” and took her foot off the brake. They zoomed onto Highway 50, and an oil truck, horn blaring wildly, swerved around them and careened down the wrong side of the
road. Ellie screamed. Delia was too terrified to scream. They veered onto the shoulder and bounced over a stretch of dry grass before coming to a stop.

“I thought you said the light was green!” Ellie shrieked.

“I only meant—oh, Lord,” Delia said. She turned to check on Noah. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

He swallowed and then nodded.

Surreptitiously, in a movement that might have been oiled, Delia felt for her door handle. She gave it a smooth nudge downward and let the door inch open. Then she shouted, “Out, Noah! Quick!” and sprang from the car, at the same time slamming her seat forward so Noah could follow. He did, luckily. He had good reflexes. He landed almost on top of her, because she happened to step directly into some kind of hole or ditch concealed by the flattened grass. Her right ankle twisted beneath her and Noah came bruising into her shoulder, and of course she still had the sweatshirt pressed to the wound on her head, but at least they were safe.

Ellie, meanwhile, had opened her own door, causing yet another truck to honk as it passed. The bleat of the horn traveled straight through Delia’s chest. All at once her heart caved in, as if only now receiving word of the danger. Why, they had run a red light! Whizzed into highspeed traffic without a glance in either direction! Her skin began to tingle with the memory of it. She imagined that her outermost surface had actually been brushed by their near miss.

“We could have been killed!” she cried, and Ellie, rushing toward her, called, “I know! I can’t believe we’re still alive!” She flung her arms around Delia and Noah. Noah said, “Mom,” and struggled free, but Delia hugged her back. Both women were slightly teary. Ellie kept saying, “Oh, God, oh, God,” and laughing and dabbing her eyes.

“Mom,” Noah said again, from the sidelines. “Can we just go to Dr. Norman, please?”

“We’ll tell him I bumped my head,” Delia said. “He won’t think a thing about it.”

“Well, you’re right,” Ellie said. “We’ll do that. Come on, if I can get up the nerve to drive again.”

So they all climbed back in the car, which turned out to be a Plymouth, just a year or two newer than Delia’s Plymouth; and Ellie waited till there wasn’t another vehicle in sight before inching out onto the
highway and executing a U-turn. Not until they were traveling back down 380 did she venture to speak, even; she was so intent on her driving. Then she asked Noah what he planned to tell his father.

Noah let a long pause develop, but finally he said, “Same thing we tell Dr. Norman, I guess. You gave us a ride home from school? Delia banged her head some way?”

“I knocked against the car door as I got in,” Delia suggested.

“Oh, good,” Ellie said, and her hands relaxed on the wheel.

Most likely it was Delia she had been worrying about. She must have known that Noah wouldn’t tattle; he had that disconcertingly cold, stoic secretiveness you often see in children of troubled marriages.

“And in fact that’s almost what happened,” Ellie said. “We just got caught up in one of those, what you might call flurries of events, right? Am I right?”

“Well, of course,” Delia told her.

Ellie slowed for the turn onto Border Street. “You may not believe this,” she said, “but I’m a very stable person as a rule. It’s just that lately, I’ve been under a lot of stress. Oh, working in front of the camera is way more pressure than I thought it would be! I have to watch my weight every instant, make sure I get my full eight hours’ sleep, take care of my complexion. See this?” She was in the midst of parallel parking, but she paused to grab a strand of her hair. “Bleached, stripped, body-waved, color-treated …” She pulled the strand taut and released it. “See how it stretches out so long and thin and then just snaps,
boing?
That’s not hair anymore; it’s, I don’t know, Silly Putty. And if only they’d give me a leave of absence till my eyebrows can grow back in!”

One tire scraped the curb. “Besides which there’s my nutso sister losing her marbles over Dad’s marriage,” she said, “and this leak in my apartment ceiling nobody knows where from, and not to mention Dad himself. What business does he have, starting all over at his age? He’s sixty-seven years old and in constant pain to boot, were you aware of that? Why do you suppose he keeps Noah’s visits so short? His favorite grandchild, but any more than an hour and Dad’s exhausted!”

“Oh, the poor man,” Delia said. She opened the door and got out, still holding the sweatshirt to her head. Somehow the urgency of their errand had receded, she noticed. She flipped the seat forward for Noah, and he piled out after her.

“When I think how hard I worked moving him into that place!” Ellie told her, slamming her own door. “All those boxes I packed! I felt like
I was sending him off to camp or something. ‘Do you have the right kind of clothes for this? What will the other kids be wearing?’ And now they’re threatening to evict him.”

“Evict him!” Delia said.

They were climbing the steps of a large frame house with a wraparound porch. Noah led the way. Delia trailed behind because her ankle was slowing her down. She called, “I thought they said he could stay on after he married.”

“That was before they found out his wife was expecting,” Ellie said.

Delia halted on the top porch step and stared at her. Even Noah stared. “Expecting what?” Delia asked foolishly.

“Use your head, Delia! Why do you suppose they moved the wedding up to March?”

“Well, because … did they tell you this? Or are you just surmising?”

“Darn right they told me,” Ellie said. “Made a big announcement of it, just last week. Dad asks Binky, ‘Angel? Are you going to break the news, or am I?’ and Binky says, ‘Oh, you do it, honeybunch.’ Don’t you want to just gag? That kind of talk seems so, I don’t know, fake, when it’s a second marriage. So Dad clears his throat and says, ‘Ellie,’ he says; says, ‘you’re going to have a sister.’ Well, I was kind of slow on the uptake. I said, ‘I
already
have a sister. Several.’ He said, ‘I mean another sister. We’re pregnant.’ That’s an exact quote. ‘We,’ he said. You can bet he didn’t word it that way the first four times around.”

“But … when is this going to happen?” Delia asked.

“September.”

“September!”

Majestically, Ellie sailed through the front door. Delia stood on the porch with her mouth open. Binky had always been a rotund little person, rotund in the stomach as well, but … She looked over at Noah. “Did
you
know about this?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Well,” she said. “So you’ll have a … baby aunt! Imagine!”

As she limped through the door, she heard Ellie’s humorless snicker.

This was the first time Delia had been to Dr. Norman’s office, although his telephone number was posted next to the Millers’ kitchen phone. The instant she smelled that mixture of floor wax and isopropyl alcohol, she was overcome by a settling-in sensation—a feeling that she had returned to her rightful place; that all other places were counterfeit, temporary, foreign to her true nature. She stopped short in the foyer
(stringy Oriental rug, ginger-jar lamp on a table), until Ellie took her arm and steered her toward the waiting room. “Is he in?” she asked the woman at the desk. The woman was much older than Delia and fifty pounds heavier, but still somebody Delia could identify with, seeing her fingers poised on the chrome-rimmed keys of an ancient typewriter. “We’ve got an emergency here!” Ellie told her.