Ladder of Years

  She was in bed that night before she got around to reading Eleanor’s letter. It was more of the same: a thank you for Delia’s last postcard, news of her Meals on Wheels work. I can certainly empathize with your desire to start over! she wrote. (That careful word, empathize, revealing her effort to say just the right thing.)

  And I’m relieved it’s the reason you left. I had assumed it was Sam. I’ve wondered if maybe he expressly wanted a flighty wife, in which case you could hardly be held to blame.

  But when you’ve finished starting over, do you picture working up to the present again and coming home? Just asking.

  All my love, dear,

  Eleanor

  A furry paw reached out to bat the page, and Delia laid the letter aside. The cat had found a resting place next to her on the blankets. He had eaten an enormous meal and paid two visits to the makeshift litter box in the bathroom. She could tell he was beginning to feel at home.

  She reached for her book—Carson McCullers—and turned to where she had stopped reading last night. She read two stories and started a third. Then she found she was growing sleepy; so she set the book on the windowsill and clicked off her little reader’s light and placed it on top of the book. Light continued to shine through the partly open door, sending a rod of yellow across the floorboards. She slid downward in bed very cautiously so as not to disturb the cat. He was giving himself a bath now. He pressed against her ribs with each movement in a way that seemed accidental, but she could tell he meant to do it.

  How strange it was, when you thought about it, that animals would share quarters with humans! If Delia had been out in the wilderness, if this were some woodland creature nestling so close, she would have been astounded.

  She yawned and shut her eyes and pulled the blanket up around her shoulders.

  One of the stories she had read tonight was called “A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud.” A man in this story said people should begin by loving easier things before they worked up to another person. Begin with something less complex, he proposed. Like a tree. Or a rock. Or a cloud. The rhythm of these words kept tapping across Delia’s mind: tree, rock, cloud.

  First a time alone, then a casual acquaintance or two, then a small, undemanding animal. Delia wondered what came after that, and where it would end up.

  10

  The Sunday before Thanksgiving, Belle waylaid Delia at the bottom of the stairs. “Say, Dee,” she said. “What’re you doing for the holiday?”

  “Oh, um …”

  “Want to have dinner at my place?”

  “Well, I’d love to,” Delia said.

  “I’m serving this real hokey meal: turkey and dressing, cranberry relish …”

  “I didn’t know you cooked!”

  “I don’t,” Belle said grimly. “It’s a plot. I’m trying to look domestic for this fella I’ve been seeing.”

  At the moment, she looked anything but domestic. Sunday was always a busy day at the real estate office, and she was dressed to go out in her huge purple coat, the one with the shoulders not just padded but flaring to sharp points like an alien’s space suit. Lilac trousers swam beneath it, and the smell of her fruity, overripe perfume freighted the air all around her.

  “Vanessa is coming with Greggie,” she said. “Nice touch to invite a child, don’t you think? And these out-of-towners I just sold a house to, married couple; that’s always good. …”

  “And I would help in the food department,” Delia guessed.

  “Oh, I’m bringing in the food from outside, just between you and me. But I was thinking you could add a little, call it, class. I need for this guy to see me as all proper and respectable. And also you could advise me on the wifely touches: the centerpiece and et cetera. You must’ve used to do that stuff back home, didn’t you? Do you have one of those baskety things that look like a cornucopia?”

  “Well, not right handy,” Delia said. “But I’ll be glad to do what I can.”

  “Great,” Belle said. She toed the cat aside—he had followed Delia downstairs—and opened the front door. They stepped out into a chilly, tin-colored day. “This fella’s name is Henry McIlwain, did I mention that?” she asked. “We’ve been dating several weeks now and I’d like to start getting more purposeful. I don’t want him thinking I’m just a goodtime gal! Maybe you could drop a few remarks in front of him. Something like, ‘Gosh, Belle, I hope you made your famous brussels-sprout dish.’”

  “You’re serving him brussels sprouts?”

  “I don’t have any choice. It’s the only green vegetable Copp Catering offers that will fit in my toaster oven.”

  Delia said, “How did you manage the meals when you were living with Norton?”

  “We ate out. But this time I want to do things differently. Maybe while Henry’s listening you could ask me for one of my recipes.”

  “I can hardly wait to hear how you’ll answer,” Delia said.

  “Dinner’s at one, but could you come down a bit early to help set up? And wear your gray pinstripe. Your gray pinstripe is so … gray; know what I mean?”

  On Thanksgiving Day Delia slept late, and she idled the morning away drinking tea and reading in bed, with the cat curled up beside her. Across the hall, in Mr. Lamb’s room, an announcer’s voice droned steadily. This was a TV announcer, Delia had figured out; not radio. Now that she kept her door cracked open, she could hear how the music swelled and diminished without apparent reason, responding to some visual cue; and today she caught distinct phrases each time she emerged for more tea water. “The mother bear leads her cubs …,” she heard, and, “The female spider injects her victims …” Evidently Mr. Lamb was watching nature shows.

  Shortly after noon, she rose and started dressing. It was a pity she didn’t have a string of pearls to add a festive note, she thought. Or at least a scarf. Didn’t she own a paisley scarf with gray commas around the edges? Yes, she did—back in Baltimore. She could see it lying folded in her grandmother’s lacquer glove box.

  She applied an extra-bright coat of lipstick, and then she leaned toward the mirror to smooth her hair. It was longer now, which made her curls look flatter and somehow calmer—very suitable for Miss Grinstead. Although when she stepped back to gauge the total effect, the person who came to mind was not Miss Grinstead at all. It was Rosemary Bly-Brice.

  She turned sharply from the mirror and picked up the vase of autumn flowers she had bought the day before.

  The cat came along when she left. He scampered after her down the stairs, and he tumbled around her ankles while she knocked at the living-room door. When nobody answered she tried the other door, the one to the right, and finally she turned the knob and poked her head into the dining room. “Anybody home?” she asked.

  Goodness, Belle did need her services. The table—one of those long, narrow, wood-grain affairs you see at PTA bazaars—was not even spread with a cloth yet. Delia put her flowers down and walked on into the kitchen. “Belle?” she said.

  Belle was leaning against the sink. Her arms were clamped across the bosom of a violently frilled white apron, and tears were streaming down her face.

  “Belle? What’s happened?” Delia asked.

  “He’s not coming,” Belle said thickly.

  “Your date?”

  “He’s back with his wife.”

  “I didn’t know he had a wife.”

  “Well, he does.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  In fact, she was shocked, but she tried not to show it. No wonder Belle had been so eager to look respectable! Delia gave her a tentative pat, just in case she wanted consoling. She did, it turned out. She fell into Delia’s arms, sobbing hotly against her neck.

  “He was perfect for me!” she wailed. “He was exactly what I wanted! And then this morning he calls up and—oh, I should have known from how low he was speaking, mumbly low secretive voice like he was scared somebody might hear him—”

  She drew back from Delia’s embrace to snap a paper towel off the roll abov
e the sink. Blotting first one eye and then the other, she said, “‘Belle,’ he tells me, ‘about today. Something’s come up,’ he tells me. ‘Oh?’ I ask. ‘What’s that?’ Thinking maybe he couldn’t start the car, or wanted to bring a friend. ‘Well, it’s like this,’ he tells me. ‘Seems like Pansy and I have gotten back together.’”

  “Pansy would be his wife,” Delia guessed.

  “Yes, and the baby’s name is Daffodil, can you believe it?”

  “There’s a baby?”

  “And it wasn’t even a springtime baby! It was born in October!”

  “You’re talking about … this past October?”

  Belle nodded, loudly blowing her nose.

  “So the baby is, what, a month old?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Ah.”

  Belle’s apron was so new that the pinholes still showed from the packaging. Her hairdo was even larger than usual, and she wore the first actual dress Delia had ever seen her in—or presumably it was a dress, for her legs were visible beneath the apron, encased in nylon stockings with a frosty white sheen like the bloom on plums. But her face was a disaster—blurred lipstick and blackened eyes and gray dribbles of tears. “You’ll have to get in touch with the others,” she was saying as she dabbed the tears. “I can’t possibly go through with dinner.”

  “But everything’s all ready,” Delia said. She was taking stock of the foil-wrapped, disposable pans covering one counter, and the plates and silver heaped on the kitchen table, and the empty serving dishes waiting to be filled. Through the oven’s lighted window she could make out a brown turkey, although she wasn’t able to smell it, for some reason. “That turkey looks about done,” she told Belle.

  “It arrived done. I’m just reheating it. I had to keep it in the fridge overnight.”

  “So, why not go ahead with your party? Maybe it’ll cheer you up.”

  “Nothing could cheer me up,” Belle said.

  “Oh, now, you sit here and I’ll see to things.”

  “I wish I was dead and buried,” Belle said, pulling out one of the kitchen chairs. She sank into it and picked up the cat. “I’m getting too old to be jilted! I’m thirty-eight years old. It’s tiring to keep going on first dates.”

  Delia didn’t answer, because she was hunting a tablecloth. No telling where Belle kept her linens. This was one of those fifties kitchens with shiny bare walls and enormous white appliances and rust-specked white metal cabinets and drawers. She slid open every drawer with a clanking sound. Most were empty. Eventually she located a jumble of fabrics in the space below the sink. “Aha!” she said, shaking out a wrinkled damask cloth. She carried it into the dining room and spread it over the table, resettling her flowers in the center. “I know you must have candlesticks,” she called.

  “We met last spring,” Belle said. “I was the one who sold off their house. They were moving to a bigger place on account of the baby coming. And wouldn’t you know it took me six months, with the market the way it’s been.”

  Delia opened all the drawers of the apple-green bureau that served as a dining room buffet. She found two brass candlesticks lying in a nest of extension cords, and she placed them on either side of the flowers. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Belle had sold the house just as Daffodil arrived. “Settlement date was two days before due date,” she said. “Kid was born three days later. So naturally I stopped by the hospital with a giftie; these things are tax-deductible. And there was Henry all proud and fatherly, took me down the hall to that baby window they have and showed me how smart and cute and blah-blah-blah. Well, he just got to me, you know? I stood there not hearing a word he said, watching how his mouth moved, and all at once I thought, Suppose I was to step forward and kiss him, what do you guess he’d do?”

  “Candles?” Delia asked.

  “Try the broom cupboard.” Belle blew her nose with a honking sound that caused the cat to spring off her lap. “And this was not even my usual style of man,” she said. “He was skinny! And pale! And computerish! But there I stood, thinking, Suppose I unbuttoned my blouse right here in front of the baby window, staring at his mouth the whole time and running the tip of my tongue across my lower lip.”

  The candles were not in the broom cupboard but on top of the refrigerator, in a yellowing white box. Even the candles were yellowed, and also a bit warped, but Delia fitted them into the holders anyway. Then she collected the dishes and silver from the kitchen table and dealt them out. Belle proceeded through the baby’s colic, the new parents’ cranky quarrels, her own warm-eyed, cooing sympathy. “I schemed and plotted, I lay in wait,” she said. “I told him my door was always open. Two, three, four o’clock in the morning he would leave that spit-up milk and dirty-diaper smell and find me here in my spaghetti-strap nightie from Victoria’s Secret.”

  And to think all this had been going on while Delia was sound asleep! She checked the turkey. It appeared to have caved in around the breastbone. She found the brussels sprouts in their foil pan and set them in the toaster oven at 350 degrees. There were biscuits too, but she would wait to warm those till the very last minute.

  “Two weeks ago, Pansy goes back to her mom’s,” Belle said. “Takes Daffodil and leaves. I was in heaven. Didn’t you notice I’ve had this radiant glow about me lately? Oh, Delia, how can you stand it, going without a love life?”

  Holding a pack of paper napkins printed all over with pilgrims, Delia paused to reflect upon the question. “Well,” she said, “I do miss hugs, I guess. But nowadays when I think about, um, the rest of it, I just feel sort of perplexed. I think, Why did that seem like such a big deal, once upon a time? But I suppose it’s only—”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Oh, Lord, we didn’t call off dinner,” Belle said, as if she had not been sitting in the midst of Delia’s preparations. “Shoot! I can’t cope with this! See who’s there, will you, while I try to fix my face.”

  As Delia walked through the dining room to the hall, she felt drab and thin and virginal, like somebody’s spinster aunt fulfilling her duties.

  It was Vanessa at the door. She wore a leather blazer and blue jeans, and she toted Greggie on one hip. Behind her, just stepping out of their car, were a man and a woman who must have been Belle’s married couple. Delia barely had time to whisper the news to Vanessa—“Henry McIlwain’s gone back to his wife”—before the couple arrived on the porch. “Why! What have we here!” the husband told Greggie. He was young, no more than thirty, but as staid as a middle-aged man, Delia thought, with his receding tuft of black hair and his long black formal overcoat. His wife was a trim, attractive brunette in a tidy red woolen suit that reminded Delia of a Barbie-doll outfit. “I’m Delia Grinstead,” Delia told her. “This is Vanessa Linley—do you know each other?—and Greggie.”

  “We’re the Hawsers,” the husband said for both of them. “Donald and Melinda.”

  “Won’t you come in?”

  She planned to lead them into the living room, but when she turned she found Belle at the door of the dining room. She was showing all her teeth and adjusting the plunging neckline of a flowered, button-front dress. “Happy Thanksgiving!” she sang out. Whatever repairs she had made to her face had not done much good. Gray tracks still ran down her cheeks, and her eyes were pink and puffy. But she caroled, “So glad you could come! Step in and have a seat!”

  There was nowhere to sit but around the table. “Donald, you’re on my right,” Belle said, “and Vanessa’s on my left. I’ve put Greggie next to you, Vanessa. Get some phone books from the kitchen if he needs a booster. And Melinda’s on the other side of Greggie.”

  Well, maybe this was the local custom: proceeding directly to the food. But even Vanessa seemed taken aback. And the husband (still wearing his overcoat) stood frozen in place for a moment before approaching his chair. “Are we … late?” he asked Belle.

  “Late! Not at all!” she said, and she let out a cascade of musical laughter. “Delia, you’ll sit next to—”


  She broke off. “Oh!” she cried. “Delia! Honestly!”

  “What’s the matter?” Delia asked.

  “You’ve gone and laid too many places!”

  It was true. Delia had doled out all she’d found on the kitchen table, and that must have included a setting for Henry McIlwain. Belle gazed toward the chair at the far end, her eyes brimming over with fresh tears.

  “I’m sorry,” Delia told her. “We could just—”

  “Run fetch Mr. Lamb,” Belle ordered.

  “Mr. Lamb? From upstairs?”

  “Hurry, though. We’re all waiting. Tell him we’ll eat without him if he doesn’t get down here pronto.”

  What they would have eaten Delia couldn’t imagine, since there wasn’t a morsel of food anywhere in sight. But Vanessa, returning from the kitchen with several phone books, told Delia, “Go ahead. I’ll get the meal on.”

  Delia went out to the hall, which seemed very quiet after the bustle in the dining room. With the cat twining underfoot, she climbed the stairs and knocked on Mr. Lamb’s door. “Desperately, the salmon fling themselves against the current,” a stern voice announced. The door opened on a sliver of Mr. Lamb’s rag-and-bone face. “Yes?” he said, and then, “Oh!” for George had somehow managed to wriggle through the crack.

  Delia said, “Belle sent me up to invite you for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “But it seems your animal’s got into my room!”

  “Sorry,” Delia said. “Here, George.”

  She reached in for the cat, and Mr. Lamb grudgingly opened the door another few inches. Delia caught the hazelnut smell of clothes worn once and then stuffed into drawers unwashed. The television’s icy light flickered in the dimness. She scooped George up and backed away.

  “I’ve been meaning to mention the toilet arrangements under the bathroom sink,” Mr. Lamb told her.

  “The …?”

  “Couldn’t your animal use the outdoors?”