Ladder of Years (9 page)

“Can’t you ever manage a solid block of time? A whole night? Can’t you tell them you’re visiting one of your girlfriends?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” she said.

She really didn’t, come to think of it. When she married Sam she had switched generations and left everyone behind, all her old high-school classmates. “Although it’s true there’s Bootsy Fisher,” she said. (Whom Sam called Bootsy Officious: the thought rose out of nowhere.) “Her kids and mine used to carpool.”

“Can’t you say you’re at Bootsy’s?”

“Oh, no, I don’t see how I—”

And then, because she guessed from the way his mouth seemed to soften that he was about to kiss her again, she gave him a fluttery wave and hurried out the door, nearly tripping over Butch on the mat.

Funny, she thought, as she settled herself in her car, how often lately her high-school days came to mind. It must be this dizzy, damp, rumpled feeling as she rushed home from secret meetings; her telltale flushed cheeks, the used and smushed look of her lips when she risked a glance in the rearview mirror. At a stop sign she made sure that all her buttons were buttoned, and she patted her locket into place between her collarbones. Once again she heard Adrian say, “Why do you always wear a necklace?” And then, “Lie down with me, Delia,” and just as in her high-school days, she felt stirred even more by the memory than by the event itself. If she hadn’t already been seated, her legs might have buckled.

Maybe she
could
say she was visiting Bootsy. Not for a whole night, of course, but for an evening. Certainly no one in her family would bother checking up on her.

She parked in the driveway, which was clear now of all cars except for Sam’s. Smoke billowed from the yard on the other side of the house. He must be firing up the grill for dinner.

She followed the trail of smoke to the little flagstone rectangle beneath the office windows. Yes, there he was, peering at the grill’s thermometer with his glasses raised. He still wore his shirt and tie and his suit trousers, minus his white coat. He looked so professional that Delia felt a flash of anxiety. Didn’t he know everything? But when he straightened, lowering his glasses, all he said was, “Hi, Dee. Where’ve you been?”

“Oh, I was … running a few errands,” she said.

She was amazed that he didn’t ask why, then, she had returned empty-handed. He just nodded and tapped the thermometer with his index finger.

Climbing the steps to the kitchen door, she felt like a woman emerging from a deep, thick daytime sleep. She walked past Eliza and drifted toward the hall. “Are you going to grill the vegetables too? Or put them in the oven?” Eliza called after her.

There wouldn’t be space for them on the grill. They would have to go in the oven, and she meant to say as much to Eliza but forgot, lost the words, and merely floated into the study. It was unoccupied, thank heaven. She didn’t believe she could have waited till she reached the phone upstairs. She lifted the receiver, dialed Adrian’s number, let his phone ring twice, and then hung up—her way of letting him know that this was not his mother-in-law. She redialed, and he answered halfway through the first ring. “Is that you?” he asked. His voice sounded urgent, intense. She sank onto a footstool and gripped the receiver more tightly.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Come back here, Delia.”

“I wish I could.”

“Come back and stay with me.”

“I want to. I do want to,” she said.

Sam’s mother said, “Delia?”

Delia slammed the phone down and jumped to her feet. “Eleanor!” she cried. She thrust her hands in the folds of her skirt to hide their tremor. “I was just—I was just—”

“Sorry to barge in,” Eleanor said, “but nobody answered the door.” She advanced to kiss the air near Delia’s ear. She smelled of soap; she was an unperfumed, unfrilled woman, sensibly clad in a drip-dry shirt-dress
and Nikes, with a handsome face and clipped white monkish hair. “Didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation.”

“No, I was just winding it up,” Delia told her.

“It appears that someone has left some articles on your front porch.”

“Articles?”

Delia had a fleeting vision of Dr. Adwater’s article on charisma.

“Badminton sets and rafts and such, scattered all about where anyone might stumble on them.”

Eleanor was the kind of guest who felt it her duty to point out alarming flaws in the household. How long had their toilet been making that noise? Did they know they had a tree limb about to come down? Delia always countered by pretending that she was a guest herself. “Imagine that!” she said. “Let me take you to Sam. He’s out by the grill.”

“Now, I thought you weren’t going to any fuss,” Eleanor told her, leading the way from the study. Instead of a purse, she had one of those belt packs, glow-in-the-dark chartreuse nylon, riding in front of her stomach like some sort of add-on pregnancy. It caused her to walk slightly swaybacked, although ordinarily her posture was perfect.

“I’m only serving grilled chicken,” Delia said as they crossed the hall. “Nothing complicated.”

“Tinned soup would have been plenty,” Eleanor said. She eyed a browning apple core centered on the newel post. “Particularly in view of all you need to do for your beach trip.”

Did she mean this as a reproach? Every year, Sam suggested inviting his mother along to the beach, and every year Delia talked him out of it, which was why they always held this placatory family dinner the night before they left. It wasn’t that Delia disliked his mother. She knew that Eleanor was admirable. She knew that she herself would never have coped so magnificently in Eleanor’s circumstances—widowed early, forced to take a secretarial job to support herself and her young son. (And to hear Sam tell it, his father had not been much use anyhow—a weak and ineffectual, watery sort of man.) The trouble was, in Eleanor’s presence Delia felt so inadequate. She felt so frivolous and spendthrift and disorganized. Their vacation was the one time she could hope to shake off that feeling.

Besides, she couldn’t imagine the Iron Mama lolling on a beach towel.

“Did Linda get here?” Eleanor was asking as they entered the kitchen. “Are the twins just huge? Where are they all?”

It was Eliza, standing at the sink, who answered. “The twins are at the pool,” she said. “Linda just left with Susie to fetch them home. How’re you doing, Eleanor?”

“Oh, couldn’t be better. Is that asparagus I see? Delia, my word, do you know what asparagus
costs
?”

“I found some on sale,” Delia lied. “I’m going to roast it in the oven in this new way, really simple. No fuss,” she added craftily.

“Well, if your idea of simple is asparagus and roast squab!”

“Chicken, actually.”

“Just an old withered carrot would have been good enough for me,” Eleanor said.

She headed for the back door, with Delia meekly shadowing her.

In the side yard, Sam was tinkering with the grill knobs. “Looks about the right temperature,” he told Delia. “Hello, Mother. Good to see you.”

“What’s going on with the shrubbery, son?” Eleanor asked, looking past him.

“We’re having it taken out,” he said. “Putting in a whole new bunch of plantings.”

“Why, that must cost a fortune! Couldn’t you just work with what you had, for gracious sake?”

“We wanted totally new,” Sam told her. (
We
? Delia thought.) “We’re tired of working with what we had. Dee, believe I’m ready to start cooking.”

As Delia walked toward the house, she heard Eleanor say, “Well, I don’t know, son. This life of yours seems mighty rich for
my
blood, what with asparagus for dinner and grilled pheasant.”

“Chicken!” Delia called back.

Eliza must have heard too, for she was grinning to herself when Delia opened the screen door. “You bring it to him,” Delia told her. “I can’t stand another minute.”

“Oh, now, you take her too much to heart,” Eliza said as she went over to the refrigerator. Eliza seemed to find Eleanor merely amusing. But then, Eliza wasn’t Eleanor’s daughter-in-law. She didn’t have Eleanor held up before her daily as a paragon of thrift, with her professional-quality tool chest and her twelve-column budget book and her thrice-used, washed-and-dried sandwich bags.

Did it ever occur to Sam that Delia and his father might well have been kindred spirits?

She gathered up the silverware, ten of everything, and went into the
dining room. Here the sounds from the yard were muted, and she could let her mind return to Adrian. She traveled around the table, doling out knives and forks and remembering the rustle of Adrian’s fingers on her collar, his warm breath when he kissed her. But she could no longer truly feel the kiss, she discovered. Eleanor’s interruption must have startled all feeling out of her, as in the old days when the telephone rang while she and Sam were making love and she had lost her place, so to speak, and not been able to fall back into it afterward.

She returned to the kitchen and found Eliza pondering in front of the glassware cupboard. “Which do we want?” Eliza asked her. “Iced tea or wine?”

“Wine,” Delia answered promptly.

From the side yard, Eleanor’s confident voice came sailing: “Have you checked the price of asparagus lately?”

“Pretty steep, is it,” Sam said equably.

“Sky-high,” Eleanor told him. “But that’s what we’re having for dinner tonight: asparagus and grilled peacock.”

Eliza was the only one who laughed.

Supper was late, for one reason or another. First Linda and Susie took forever bringing the twins from the pool, and then Ramsay didn’t appear till seven although he’d promised faithfully to be home by six, and when he did show up he had his girlfriend in tow and her wan and silent six-year-old daughter. This enthralled the twins, of course, but Delia was furious. It had been understood that tonight would be strictly family. However, she didn’t have quite what it took to face Ramsay down in public. Seething inwardly, she scrunched two extra, mismatched place settings in among the others before she called everyone to the table.

Velma, the girlfriend, was a tiny, elfin woman with a cap of glassy hair and a pert little figure set off by trim white shorts. Delia could see what her appeal was, sort of. For one thing, when she entered the dining room she went straight to one of the orphan place settings, as if she were accustomed to existing on the edges of events. And for another, she was so inexhaustibly vivacious that even Carroll—surly Carroll—brightened in her presence, and Sam made a point of giving her the largest piece of chicken. (“Got to put some meat on your bones,” he said—not his type of remark at all.) Then she endeared herself to Linda by marveling at the twins’ names. “I’m crazy about things that sound French—I guess
you can tell from me naming my daughter Rosalie,” she said. “Shoot, I’d like to
go
to France. The furtherest I’ve been is Hagerstown a few times for hair shows.”

Velma was a beautician. She worked in one of those unisex places, which was how she and Ramsay had met. He had come in for a haircut and invited her on the spot to a tea at the house of his freshman adviser. Now he sat proudly next to her, one arm resting on the back of her chair, and beamed around the table at his family. Short though he was (he took after Delia’s father), he seemed manly and imposing alongside Velma.

“Although last fall I did attend a color conference in Pittsburgh,” Velma was recalling. “I stayed overnight and left Rosalie with my mother.”

Rosalie, perched behind the other odd plate, raised her enormous, liquid eyes and gave Velma a look that struck Delia as despairing.

“Everybody in our whole entire shop has been trained to do your colors,” Velma went on. Was she speaking to Eleanor, of all people? Eleanor nodded encouragingly, wearing her most gracious expression.

“Some people ought to wear cool colors and some people ought to wear warm,” Velma told her, “and they should never, ever cross over, though you’d be shocked at how many try.”

“Would that be determined by temperament, dear?” Eleanor asked.

“Ma’am?”

But Eleanor was sidetracked just then by the plate that Sam was filling for her. “Oh, mercy, Sam,” she said, “not such a great big helping!”

“I thought you asked for a breast.”

“Well, I did, but just a little one. That one’s way too big for me.”

He forked another and held it up. “This okay?”

“Oh, that’s huge!”

“Well, there’s nothing smaller, Mother.”

“Can’t you just cut it in half? I could never manage to eat all that.”

He put it back on the platter to cut it.

“This one lady,” Velma told the others, “she was wearing pink when she came in and I’m like, ’Lady, you are so, so wrong. You should be all in cools,’ I tell her, ’with the tone of skin you got.’ She says, ’Oh, but that’s why I head for warm.’ Says, ’I go for what’s my opposite.’ I could not believe her. I really could not believe her.”

“Sam, dear, that’s about six times as much asparagus as I can possibly handle,” Eleanor said.

“It’s three spears, Mother. How can I give you a sixth of that?”

“I just want a half a spear, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“You, now,” Velma told Eliza, “you would look stunning in magenta. With your coal-black hair? That tan color doesn’t do a thing for you.”

“However, I’m partial to tan,” Eliza said in her declarative way.

“And Susie, I bet you had your colors done already. Right? That aqua’s real becoming.”

“It was the only thing not in the laundry,” Susie said. But she was fighting down a pleased expression around the mouth.

“I dress Rosalie in nothing
but
aqua, just about. She turns washed out in any other color.”

“Sam, I hate to be a nuisance,” Eleanor said, “but I’m going to send my plate back to you so you can take a teensy little bit of that potato salad off and give it to someone else.”

“Well, why not just keep it, Mother.”

“But it’s much too large a helping, dear.”

“Then eat what you can and leave the rest, why don’t you.”

“Now, you know how I hate to waste food.”

“Oh, just force yourself to choke the damn stuff down, then, Mother!”