Ladder of Years

  “Naw, we can do that,” Rick said.

  Carroll said, “I just had breakfast, Mom. I told you.”

  “Yes, but this is something you wouldn’t want to miss,” she said. “Not a drop of tomato sauce! And it comes with really good french fries and homemade coleslaw!”

  She didn’t know why she was making such a fuss about it. Carroll was clearly not hungry; he was still staring at Rick. But she called, “Two platters, please, Rick, and two large Cokes.”

  “You got it.”

  Mr. Bragg spun his stool around so he could study them. His thin white crew cut stood erect, giving him the look of someone flabbergasted. “Why!” he cried. “What’s happened with this boy?”

  Delia glanced toward Carroll in alarm.

  “How’d he shoot up so fast?” Mr. Bragg asked. “How’d he get so big all at once?”

  She wondered if the old man had somehow read her mind, but then he said, “Last Christmas he was only yea tall,” and he set a palm down around the level of his shins.

  “Oh,” Delia said. “No, that’s Noah you’re thinking of.”

  It was common knowledge by now that Mr. Bragg was failing, which was why poor Rick and Teensy couldn’t send him back wherever he came from.

  “Who’s Noah?” was his next question.

  “Who’s Noah?” Carroll echoed.

  “Just the boy who …” She felt rattled, as if she had been caught in some disloyalty. “Just the son of my employer,” she said. “So! Carroll. Tell me all that’s been going on at home. Has the Casserole Harem descended? Lots of apple pies streaming in?”

  “You haven’t asked about Aunt Liza,” Carroll told her.

  “Eliza? Is she all right?”

  “Well. All right, I guess,” he said.

  “What is that supposed to mean? Is she sick?”

  “No, she’s not sick.”

  “Last Christmas you were just a shrimp,” Mr. Bragg called. “You and her were drinking coffee together, tee-heeing over the presents you’d bought.”

  “Eliza is still taking care of the house, isn’t she?” Delia persevered.

  But Carroll seemed distracted by Mr. Bragg. He said, “Who’s he talking about?”

  “I told you: my employer’s son.”

  “Is that why you’ve got that bag with you? Tasteful Clothing for the Discerning Young Man’? You buy this kid clothes? You tee-hee together? And what’s that you’re wearing, for God’s sake?”

  Delia looked down. She wasn’t wearing anything odd—just her Miss Grinstead cardigan and the navy print housedress. “Wearing?” she said.

  “You’re so, like, ensconced.”

  Two plates appeared before them, clattering against the Formica. “Ketchup, anyone?” Rick asked.

  “No, thanks.” She told Carroll, “Honey, I—”

  “I would like ketchup,” Carroll announced belligerently.

  “Oh. Sorry. Yes, please, Rick.”

  Carroll said, “Have you forgotten you have a son who puts ketchup on his french fries?”

  “Honey, believe me,” she said, “I would never forget. Well, maybe about the ketchup, but never about—”

  A plastic squirt bottle arrived, along with their Cokes in tall paper cups. “Thank you, Rick,” she said.

  She waited till he had left again, and then she reached across the table and touched Carroll’s hand. His knuckles were grained like leather. His lips were chapped. There was something too concrete about him; she was accustomed to the misty, soft-edged Carroll of her daydreams.

  “I would never forget I have children,” she told him.

  “Right. That’s why you sashayed off down the beach and didn’t once look back at them.”

  Someone said, “Delia?”

  She started. Two teenage girls stood over their table—Kim Brewster and Marietta something. Schwartz? Schmidt? (She brought Joel homemade fudge so sweet it zinged through your temples.) “Well! Hello there!” Delia said.

  “You won’t tell Mr. Miller you saw us here, will you?” Kim asked. Kim was one of Delia’s remedial pupils; lately, Delia had been volunteering as a math tutor over at the school. “He would kill us if he found out!”

  “We’re cutting class,” Marietta put in. “We saw you in here and we figured we’d ask: you know how Mr. Miller’s birthday is coming up.”

  Delia hadn’t known, but she nodded. Anything to get rid of them.

  “So a bunch of us are chipping in on a present, and we thought you might could tell us what to buy him.”

  “Oh! Well…”

  “I mean, you know him better than anyone. He doesn’t smoke, does he? Seems like a lot of gifts for guys are smokers’ stuff.”

  “He doesn’t smoke, no,” Delia said.

  “Not even a pipe?”

  “Not even a pipe.”

  “He’s always so, you know, distinguished and all, we think he’d look great with a pipe. Maybe we should just get him one anyways.”

  “No, I really think he would hate that,” Delia said firmly. “Well! It was good seeing you girls.”

  But Kim was studying Carroll now from beneath her long silky lashes. “You don’t go to Old Underwear,” she informed him.

  Carroll flushed and said, “Underwear?”

  “Our high school: Dorothy Underwood,” she said, snapping her gum. “You must be from out of town.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I knew we hadn’t seen you around.”

  Delia started eating her coleslaw; she felt it would be a kindness not to look at Carroll’s face. But Carroll just picked up the ketchup and squirted it thoroughly and methodically over every single one of his french fries. “Well …,” Kim said at last, and the two of them moved on toward an empty booth, trailing crumbs of remarks behind them. “Thanks anyhow, Dee …,” they said, and, “If you think of something …”

  Delia took a sip of Coke.

  “So who’s the guy?” Carroll asked, setting down the ketchup with a thump.

  Confused, she glanced around the café.

  “The guy with the pipe, Mom. The oh-so-distinguished guy that you know so extremely-emely well.”

  “Oh,” she said. She laughed, not quite naturally. “It’s nothing like that! He’s my boss.”

  “Right.”

  He pushed his plate away. “It all fits together now,” he said. “No wonder you weren’t home for Labor Day.”

  “Labor Day?”

  “Dad said you’d be back by then, but I guess it’s pretty clear now why you weren’t.”

  She stared at him. “Dad said I’d be back by Labor Day?”

  “He said you just needed some time to yourself and you’d come home at the end of the summer. We were counting on it. He promised. Susie thought we should go get you, but he said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘leave her be. I guarantee she’ll be here for our Labor Day picnic,’ he said. And look what happened: you went back on your word.”

  “My word!” Delia cried. “That was his word! I didn’t have a thing to do with it! And what right was it of his, I’d like to know? Who is he to guarantee when I’ll be home?”

  “Now, Mom,” Carroll said in an undertone. He glanced furtively toward Rick. “Let’s not make a big thing of this, okay? Try and calm down.”

  “Don’t you tell me to calm down!” she cried, and at the same time she caught herself wondering exactly how often she had uttered that sentence before. Don’t you tell me to calm down! And, I am completely cool and collected. But to Sam; not to Carroll. Oh, it all came back to her now: that sense of being the wrong one, the flighty, unstable, excitable one. (And the more she protested, of course, the more excitable she appeared.) She gripped the edge of the table with both hands and said, “I am completely cool and collected.”

  “Well, fine,” Carroll told her. “I’m glad to hear it.” And he picked up a red-soaked french fry and threaded it into his mouth with elaborate indifference.

  I’m glad to hear it was one of Sam’s favorite responses. Along with If yo
u say so, Dee, and Have it your way. After which he might serenely turn a page, or he would start talking with the boys about some unrelated subject. Always so sure he was right; and the fact was, he was right, generally. When he criticized people she liked, she would suddenly notice their faults; and when he criticized Delia, she saw herself all at once as the foolish little whiffet he believed her to be. Like now, for instance: he had promised she would slink home by summer’s end, and the picture of that humbled return was so convincing that she almost felt it had happened. She couldn’t even desert properly! Had only been off in a pout, anyhow. Just needed to get it out of her system.

  Although, in fact, she had not slunk home. Not by summer’s end and not afterward. Not to this day. She had actually made a life for herself in a town Sam had nothing to do with.

  So when Belle sailed in, calling, “Hey, Dee, I thought that was you I saw,” Delia made a point of rising to give her a flamboyant hug.

  “Belle!” she cried, and Belle (her purple-clad figure a luxurious, pillowy armful) had the grace to hug her back.

  “Who’s your new fella?” she asked.

  “This is my son Carroll. This is Belle Flint,” she told Carroll. She kept an arm around Belle’s waist. “How’re you doing, Belle?”

  “Well, you’re never going to guess what, not in a million years.”

  “What?” Delia asked, a little too enthusiastically.

  “Swear you won’t tell Vanessa, now. This is just between the two of us.”

  But the whole demonstration went for nothing, because just then Carroll stood up and pushed his way out of the booth. “So long,” he mumbled, head down.

  “Carroll?”

  She dropped her arm from Belle’s waist.

  “Tomorrow night,” Belle was saying, “I’ve asked Horace Lamb to the movies.”

  Horace Lamb? Delia felt an inner hitch of surprise even as she went hurrying after Carroll. He lunged out the café door. “Carroll, honey!” she called.

  On the sidewalk, Teensy was mincing toward them beneath a gigantic new busby of exploding red ringlets. Carroll almost ran her down. Teensy said, “Oh!” and took a step back, reaching up to feel for her hairdo as if she feared it might have toppled off. “Delia, tell me the truth,” she said. “Do you honestly think I look silly?”

  “Not a bit,” Delia told her. “Carroll, wait!”

  Carroll wheeled, his eyebrows beetling. “Never mind me, just tend to your pals!” he said. “Orphan Annie here and Mr. Distinguished and little Tee-hee Boy and Veranda or whoever …”

  Vanessa, Delia almost corrected him, while behind her, Teensy asked, “Delia? Is everything all right?” and Belle, in the doorway, said, “Kids. But that’s just how they are, I guess.”

  “I was going to do you a favor,” Carroll said.

  “What, honey?”

  “I was going to tip you off to what’s going on at home, but never mind. Just never mind now,” he said.

  Still, he didn’t turn and leave. He seemed to be suspended, teetering on the squeaky rubber soles of his gym shoes. Cannily, Delia came no closer. She stayed six or eight feet away from him, her face a mask of smoothness. “What’s going on at home?” she asked him.

  “Oh, nothing. Not a thing! Except that your own blood sister is making a play for your husband,” he said.

  “Eliza?”

  “And Dad’s so out of it, he just laughs it off when we tell him. But we’ve all noticed, me and Susie and Ramsay notice plain as day, and we can guess how it’s going to end up, we bet, too.”

  “Eliza would never do that,” Delia said, but she was trying out the notion even as she spoke. She cast her mind back to the living-room couch, the row of marriageable maidens. Whenever I hear the word “summer” I smell this sort of melting smell. And now it seemed that Sam sent Eliza a quick, alert, appreciative glance, as he had not done in real life. It wasn’t impossible, Delia saw.

  But she told Carroll, “You must be imagining things.”

  “Oh, what do you care?” Carroll burst out, and he spun around again and started running toward West Street.

  “Carroll, don’t go!”

  She followed at a fast walk. (How far could he get, after all?) He crossed George Street, halting briefly for a mail truck, and disappeared around the corner. Delia picked up her pace. On West Street she saw him loping south, passing Mr. Pomfret, who stood in front of his office speaking with a UPS man. She raced by Mr. Pomfret herself, with her face averted; the last thing she needed just now was another acquaintance calling out her name. She lost sight of Carroll for an instant and then spotted him near the florist’s. He was jogging up and down on the curb as he waited for a break in the traffic. Evidently he was headed for the square. Good: they could sit on a bench together. Catch their breath. Talk this over.

  But once he’d crossed the street, he stopped at one of the cars parked along the perimeter. A gray car, a Plymouth. Her Plymouth. With Ramsay at the wheel. She recognized his dear, blocky profile. Carroll opened the passenger door and got in. The engine ground to life, and the car swung out into traffic.

  Even then she might have run after them. They were forced to drive very slowly at first. But she stayed where she was, brought up short on the sidewalk with one hand pressed to her throat.

  Ramsay had been right here in town. He had driven all these miles and then not bothered to visit her. Susie too, perhaps, although Delia had glimpsed only two heads in the Plymouth.

  She deserved this, of course. There was no denying that.

  She turned and retraced her steps to Rick-Rack’s, all but feeling her way.

  An enormous amount had happened to her, but when she reached the café Belle and Teensy were still talking out front, Kim and Marietta were blowing sultry ribbons of cigarette smoke inside, and Rick was tucking her lunch bill under the ketchup container. She counted out her money in slow motion and paid, not forgetting to leave a tip on the table. She gathered her purse and her Young Mister bag and walked out the door, through the scorched, chemical smell of Teensy’s hairdo, through the clack and tumble of Belle’s chatter. “Have you ever noticed,” Belle was saying, “that Horace Lamb looks the eentsiest little bit like Abraham Lincoln?”

  At the corner, Delia turned south. The clock in the optician’s window read eleven-fifteen—nowhere near time for lunch, and yet she regretted leaving that barbecue sandwich. And the coleslaw had been superb. It was the creamy kind, with lots of celery seeds. A seed or two still lodged in her mouth, woodsy and fragrant when she bit down. She savored the taste on her tongue. She felt the most amazing hunger, all at once. She felt absolutely hollow. You would think she hadn’t eaten in months.

  15

  For a short while after Carroll’s visit, half a dozen spots around town seemed haunted by his presence. Here was the ivy-filled window where he had first appeared, here the booth at Rick-Rack’s where he’d sat, here Belle’s front porch where he must have spent several minutes waiting for someone to answer the door. (Had he noticed the scaly paint? The hammocking of the floorboards under his tread?) In Delia’s memory he seemed not surly now but sad, his porcupine behavior merely a sign of hurt feelings. She should have taken him with her when she left, she thought. Except that then she would have had to take Susie and Ramsay too. Otherwise it would have looked like favoritism. She saw herself striding down the coastline with her retinue—the two boys’ ropy wrists in her grasp, Susie scurrying to keep up. Where we going, Mom? Hush, don’t ask; we’re running away from home.

  Although her children had been partly what she was running from, as it happened.

  Then she reflected that after all, Carroll had not appeared ruined by her leaving. He had survived just fine, and so had his brother and sister. And she remembered Nat’s philosophy: we ought to forget our grown offspring as easily as cats forget theirs. She smiled to herself. Well, maybe not quite as easily.

  Still, wasn’t it true that over the past several years, her children had turned into semistrangers—
at last even her youngest? That not only had she lost her central importance to them but they, in fact, had become just a bit less overwhelmingly all-important to her?

  She sat stone still, staring into space, wondering how long ago she had first begun to know that.

  Then, having watched her children slip free, she turned to what remained: her husband.

  If he really did remain.

  In her mind’s eye he sat at the breakfast table while Eliza poured his coffee. Eliza wore her tan safari dress and even a bit of rouge. She was not unattractive, from certain angles. She had that smooth, yellowish skin that didn’t go all fragile with age, and the rouge turned her dark eyes bright and snappy. She would insinuate herself into Sam’s routine, take over his charts and bills, provide him with hot meals and a seamlessly organized household. “Why, thanks, Eliza,” Sam would say feelingly. Men were so gullible sometimes! And he had more in common with Eliza than you might suspect. Granted, Eliza claimed she was living life over and over again until she got it right, while Sam said that for his part, he meant to get it right the first time. But both of them did assume that “getting it right” was possible. Delia herself had more or less given up trying.

  Besides which, there was the fact that Eliza was Delia’s sister. She had Delia’s small, neat bone structure and her phenomenally sound teeth, her tendency to get out of hand after eating any sugar, her habit of letting her sentences trail away unfinished. Loving Eliza would come as naturally to Sam as appreciating a song he had already heard once before.

  Delia felt an impulse to jump in the car and tear off to Baltimore, but she knew how trite that was—to want a man back the instant she learned he was wanted by someone else. She made herself sit still. This is what you asked for, she told herself.

  This other woman’s maimed husband and child, this too new ranch house with its walls that thunked like cardboard when you rapped them, this thin town propped on a countryside as flat and pale as paper.

  Before dawn one morning, she came sharply awake, perhaps disturbed by a dream, although no fragments of it lingered. She lay in bed recalling, for some reason, the first dinner party she’d given after she and Sam were married. He had wanted to invite two of his old classmates, along with their wives. For days she had pored over possible menus. She had refused her sisters’ offers of help; she had extracted her family’s promise not to show their faces during the evening. It was essential that she prove she was a grown-up. And yet from the moment the first couple arrived, she had felt herself sinking back into childhood. “Hey, Grin,” the husband had said to Sam. Grin! Would she ever feel so comradely as to call Sam that herself? she had wondered, twisting her skirt. “Hi, Joe,” Sam had said. “Delia, I’d like you to meet Joe and Amy Guggles.” Delia had not been informed of their last name ahead of time, and in fact had never heard the name Guggles in all her life. It had struck her as funny, and she’d started laughing. She slid into helpless cascades of laughter, her breath dissolving in squeaks, her eyes streaming tears, her cheeks beginning to ache. It was like being in sixth grade again. She laughed herself boneless, while the couple watched her with kindly concern and Sam kept saying, “Delia? Honey?”