Ladder of Years (36 page)

Oh, yes, the emergency. Delia had almost forgotten. While Ellie explained the circumstances (“sharp metal corner on the … nothing
I
could do … tried to warn her but …”), Delia unstuck the sweatshirt from her forehead and discovered she was no longer bleeding. The bloodstains on the shirt had dried to a dull, blackish color. She glanced toward the other patients. Two women and a small girl sat watching her with interest, and she hastily clapped the sweatshirt back on her temple.

Dr. Norman was just hanging up the phone when the secretary led them in. He was a dumpy man with a flounce of white curls above his ears. “What have we here?” he asked, and he rose and came around the desk to peel away the sweatshirt with practiced fingers. His breath smelled of pipe tobacco. Delia would have liked to take hold of his hand and cradle it against her cheek. “Hmm,” he said, peering. “Well, nothing you’ll die of.”

“Will it leave a scar?” Delia asked him.

“It shouldn’t. Hard to tell for sure till I get it cleaned up.”

“Of course I did everything humanly possible,” Ellie said. “Warned her over and over again. ‘Watch yourself getting in, Dee,’ I told her; if I told her once, I told her half a dozen times—”

Dr. Norman said, with a touch of impatience, “Yes, fine, Ellie, I understand,” and Ellie shut up. “Come next door,” he told Delia. He ushered her into an adjoining room. Ellie and Noah followed, which may not have been what he had intended.

This second room held an examining table upholstered in cracked black leather. Delia boosted herself nimbly onto the end of it and settled her handbag in her lap. While Dr. Norman rummaged in a metal drawer the color of condensed milk, he asked Ellie about the weather; he asked Noah about his softball team; he told Delia he had heard she was a ba-a-ad tutor.

“Bad!” Delia said.

“Good, that means.” He looked up from the rubber gloves he was
slipping on. “In T. J. Renfro’s language, ‘bad’ is good, and so is ‘wicked.’ You teach a wicked equation, he says.”

“Oh,” Delia said, relieved.

Ellie, who had been studying a poster on the Heimlich maneuver, looked over at her. “You tutor at Underwood?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She sniffed. “Joel must be in heaven,” she said. “He was always after me to volunteer.”

Dr. Norman sent Ellie a quick glance that she probably didn’t notice. Then he told Noah, “Excuse me, son,” and stepped around him to peer again at Delia’s forehead. She stilled her swinging feet as he came close. “This’ll smart some,” he said, tearing open an antiseptic wipe. The keen, authoritative smell filled her with longing.
I’m really not just a mere patient
, she could have told him.
I know this office top to bottom! I know you’ll sit down to supper tonight and tell your family that that Ellie Miller sure acts mighty possessive of Joel, considering they’re separated. I know you’ll say you finally got to meet that live-in woman of his, and depending on how discreet you are, you might even voice some suspicion as to exactly how I was injured. Don’t think I’m one of those outsiders who can’t see beyond the white coat!

But of course she said nothing, and Dr. Norman swabbed her wound and then laid dots of rubbery warmth on either side of it as he tested it with his fingertips. “What you’ve got,” he said, “is a superficial scratch across the forehead, but a fairly deep gash at the temple. No need for stitches, though, and I doubt there’ll be a scar if we keep the edges together while it heals.” He turned back to the cabinet. “We’ll just apply a butterfly closure. This nifty type of bandage that …”

Yes, Delia knew what a butterfly was—had plastered more than a few onto her own children’s injuries. She shut her eyes as he set it in place. Next to her she heard Noah breathing; he was leaning in close to watch. “Cool!” he said.

“Now, if you want I could prescribe a pain medication,” Dr. Norman said, “but I don’t believe—”

“It hardly hurts at all,” Delia told him, opening her eyes. “I won’t need anything.”

He scrawled a note for his secretary before he showed her out, and clapped Noah on the shoulder, and said, “Ellie, always good to see your clothes hanging so well on you.”

“Oh, stop,” Ellie said. She told Delia, “Everybody pokes fun at this remark I made in
Boardwalk Bulletin.
”

Delia’s only response was, “Oh?” because she didn’t want to let on she’d read it.

“But I was misquoted!” Ellie said. “Or at least, I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was, I dress economically.”

She was still going on about that—telling Noah that this skirt, for instance, had cost thirteen ninety-five at Teenage World—when they reached the reception desk, which left Delia to pay the bill. She did think Ellie might have offered. But she had planned to decline anyhow, and so she held her tongue.

Out on the porch, she folded the sweatshirt and stuffed it in her bag. Then she followed Ellie and Noah down the steps. Ellie was discussing the clothing budget of someone named Doris. Doris? Oh, yes, the anchorwoman at WKMD. “What she spends on headbands alone,” Ellie said, “to say nothing of those scarves she wears to hide her scraggy neck …”

Delia was reflecting that she should have accepted that prescription after all, not for her forehead but for her ankle. She had completely neglected to mention twisting her ankle. She limped painfully to the car and fell with a thud into the passenger seat.

“So I guess you want to go home now,” Ellie said.

“Yes, please,” Delia told her.

But Ellie had been speaking to Noah. “Honey?” she said, watching his face in the rearview mirror.

“I guess,” he said.

“Don’t want to change your mind and visit
me
?”

“I’ve got this history test to study for.”

Ellie’s shoulders slumped. She didn’t point out that he could do that anytime over the weekend.

They cruised down Weber Street, passing Copp Catering where Belle had bought Thanksgiving dinner, and the Sub Tub, where all the Underwood students headed for snacks after school. In Ellie’s company, Delia felt that Bay Borough took on a different shading. It didn’t look as happy as it usually did. The women walking home with their grocery bags seemed unknowingly ironic, like those plastic-faced, smiling housewives in kitchen-appliance ads from the fifties. Delia shook off the thought and turned to Ellie. “Well!” she said. “Maybe I’ll run into you at your father’s sometime.”

“If I ever go back there,” Ellie said gloomily.

“Oh, you have to go back! Why wouldn’t you? He’s such a pleasure to talk to.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Ellie said. “You’re not his daughter.”

She turned onto Pendle Street, braked for a jaywalking collie, and pulled into the Millers’ driveway. (The glance she shot toward the front windows could have meant nothing at all.) “Bye, No-No,” she said, blowing her son a kiss. “Delia, sorry again about the whatever.”

“That’s all right,” Delia said.

Limping after Noah up the sidewalk, she remembered where she’d heard that phrase of Ellie’s before. “Easy for
you
,” Delia’s sisters used to tell her. They said, “Naturally
you
get along with Dad. You arrived so late, is why. You don’t have so much to hold against him.”

But they never specified just what they held against him themselves. They hadn’t been able to name it even when she asked, and she would be willing to bet that Ellie couldn’t either.

When Delia changed into the shoes she wore around the house, she found that the strap of her pump had left a groove across her right instep. Her foot was so swollen, in fact, that she seemed to be wearing a
ghost
pump, pressing into her flesh. And her anklebone had become a mere dent. She doubted anything was broken, though. She could still wriggle her toes.

She drew a dishpan of cold water, added a few ice cubes, and sat down on a kitchen chair to let the ankle soak. And what else should she do for it? All those times she’d heard Sam advising his patients; you’d think she would remember. There was a mnemonic: R.I.C.E., he always told them. She tried it aloud. “Rest, ice …” But what was the C for? Caution? Coddling? She tried again. “Rest, ice …”

“Rest, ice, compression, elevation,” Joel told her, setting his briefcase on the counter. “What happened to
you?
You look like a war orphan.”

“Oh,” Delia said, “you know that sharp corner they have on car doors …” Then she realized that this in no way explained her ankle. “It’s just been one of those days,” she finished vaguely.

He didn’t pursue it. He opened an overhead cabinet and felt for something on the top shelf. “I know we have a first-aid kit,” he said. “I had to take a course in—Here we go.” He pulled out a gray metal tackle box. “When you’re through soaking, I’ll tape it.”

“Oh, I’m through,” Delia said. She should probably allow more time, but the ice was making her shiver. She lifted her foot and patted it dry with a dish towel. Joel bent over it. He whistled.

“Maybe you ought to get that x-rayed,” he said. “Are you sure it’s not broken?”

“Pretty sure. Everything works,” Delia told him.

Moving aside the dishpan, he knelt and started unrolling a strip of flesh-colored elastic. Delia felt self-conscious about the puffiness of her ankle and the dead blue of her skin, but he showed no reaction. He began wrapping her foot, crisscrossing her instep, working his way upward in a series of perfectly symmetrical V’s. “Oh, how neat! Tidy, I mean,” Delia said. “You’re very good at this.”

“Part of a principal’s education,” Joel said. He wound the last of the bandage around her shin. Then he secured it with two metal clips the same shape as the butterfly closure on her temple. “How’s that?” he asked. He took hold of her foot, as if weighing it. “Tight enough?”

“Oh, yes, it feels …”

It felt wonderful. Not just the bandage—although the support was a great relief—but the hand clasping her foot, the large palm warming her arch through the elastic. She wished she could push even harder against his grip. She was thirsty, it seemed, for that firmness. Till now she had never realized that the instep could be an erogenous zone.

As if he guessed, he went on kneeling there, looking into her face.

“Delia?” Noah said. “Can I invite—?”

Both of them jumped. Joel dropped her foot and stood up. He said, “Noah! I thought you were off at your mother’s.”

Noah stood in the doorway, frowning.

“We were just, ah, taping Delia’s ankle,” Joel told him. “It seems she must have sprained it.”

Delia said, “Rest, ice, compression, elevation! That’s the menon … menonom …” She laughed, short of breath. “Oh, Lord, I never can pronounce it.”

Noah just watched her. Finally he said, “Can I invite Jack for supper?”

“Oh, of course!” she said. “Yes! Good idea!”

He looked at her a moment longer, looked at his father, then turned and walked out.

———

Joel wouldn’t let her cook that night. He settled her on the family-room couch with her feet up and the cat in her lap, and he went off to order a pizza. Meanwhile Noah and Jack sprawled on the floor in front of the TV. Some kind of thriller was playing. During the more suspenseful scenes a piano tinkled hypnotically. Delia loosened her hold on George and leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Behind her lids, she saw the gritty surface of Highway 50 rushing toward her. She saw the Plymouth darting across a stream of traffic, miraculously avoiding collision like a blip in a video game. She jerked awake, eyes wide and staring, shaken all over again by the narrowness of her escape.

17

The cut on Delia’s forehead healed quickly, leaving just the faintest white fishhook of a scar. The sprain, though, took longer. She favored her right ankle for weeks. “This is not my actual walk,” she wanted to tell passersby, for she felt, somehow, at a disadvantage—second rate, inferior. She wondered how people endured it when they knew they’d be disabled forever, like some of the residents in Senior City.

Senior City was the one place where her limp attracted no attention. She could proceed unhurriedly toward a waiting elevator, trusting the other passengers to hold it for her. When she finally stepped inside, she would find them conversing among themselves without a sign of impatience, one of them leaning absently on the Open button till Delia reminded her to release it. No longer did their own infirmities seem so apparent, either, or their wrinkles or white hair. Delia had adjusted her slant of vision over the past months.

And what a contrast Binky made! For anyone could see now that she was pregnant. By May she was in maternity clothes. By early June she was cupping her belly like an apronful of fruit as she rose from a chair. “Seems like things are
more so
, with this one,” she told Delia. “When I had the boys I hardly showed till the end. I used to wear unzipped jeans and one of my husband’s long-tailed shirts. But now I have to
squeeze through car doors sideways and I’ve still got three months to go.”

There was no question that this baby was unplanned. Binky said she’d been twelve weeks along before she suspected a thing—had continued proclaiming her June wedding date to all and sundry. “Then I said, ‘What
is
this?’ and I went to see my doctor. When he told me I was pregnant I just looked at him. He said, ‘But nowadays, thirty-eight is nothing. Lots of women give birth at thirty-eight.’ I said, ‘How about sixty-seven?’ He said, ‘Sixty-seven?’ I said, ‘That’s the age of the father.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ Said, ‘I see.’ Said, ‘Hmm.’”

“I view it this way,” Nat told Delia. “What better place for childbirth than a retirement community? Here we have all these doctors and nurses, just standing by twiddling their thumbs on Floor Four.”

Delia was horrified. She said, “You would go to Floor Four for this?”

“He’s teasing,” Binky told her.

“We’ll turn the cardiac unit into a labor room,” Nat went on impishly. “Use one of those railed hospital beds for a crib. And Lord knows these folks have got enough diapers around. Right, Noah?”

Noah grinned, but only at his teacup. He had reached that age where any talk of bodily functions was a monumental embarrassment.