Ladder of Years

  19

  Mr. Lamb’s car was a dull-green Maverick with one orange fender and a coat-hanger antenna. Inside, several scale-model windows filled the back seat—wood-framed, double-sashed, none more than twelve inches tall. Little girls from the neighborhood were always begging to play with them. The bottom of his trunk was paved with panes of clear plastic, so that when Delia leaned in with her suitcase, she had an impression of bending over a gleaming body of water. Mr. Lamb told her the plastic was pretty near indestructible. “Slide your suitcase right on top,” he told her. “It won’t do the least bit of harm. That’s where our product beats anything else on the market. When I go to a house that has pets? I like to lay a square of Rue-Ray on the floor and let a dog or cat march straight across, gritching with its toenails.”

  Rue-Ray, Delia knew, took its name from the married couple who owned the company, Ruth Ann and Raymond Swann. They lived above their workshop on Union Street, and Mr. Lamb was their one and only salesman. She had learned all this from Belle, but still she felt like laughing at the sound of those two slurred, slippery R’s.

  It also struck her as comical that Mr. Lamb turned out to be so talkative. Before they reached Highway 50, even, he had gone from storm windows (their noise-reduction powers) to the wedding gift he planned for Belle (a complete set of Rue-Rays, fully installed) to his philosophy of salesmanship. “The important thing to remember,” he said, veering around a tractor, “is that people like to proceed through a process. A regular set of steps for every activity. For instance, the waitress wants to give you your bill before you hand her your credit card. The mechanic wants to tell all about your fuel pump before you say to go ahead and fix it. So I ask my customers, I ask, ‘You notice any drafts? Northern rooms any colder than southern?’ I know they’ve noticed drafts. I can hear their durn windows rattle as I’m speaking. But if I let folks kind of like describe the symptoms first—say how the baby’s room is so cold at night she has to wear one of those blanket sleepers with the fold-over flaps for the hands—why, they get this sense a certain order has been followed, understand? Then I’m more apt to make the sale.”

  Unfortunately, he was one of those drivers who feel the need to look at the person they’re talking to. He kept his muddy, deep-socketed eyes fixed on Delia, his scrawny neck twisted in his collar, while Delia glued her own eyes to the road as if to make up for it. She watched a column of cypress trees approach, then a long-dead motel as low to the ground and sprawling as a deserted chicken shed, then a strip of fog-filled woods where entire clouds seemed trapped in a web of branches. Only a few leaves here and there had developed a faint tinge of orange, and she could imagine that it was still summer—that it was last summer, even, and she had not lost the year in between.

  “Many people don’t realize that salesmen consider such things,” Mr. Lamb was saying. “But salesmen are a very considering bunch, you’ll find. I say it comes from traveling by car so much. Belle had an idea we should travel by car for our honeymoon, but I told her I just didn’t know if I’d focus on her right, driving along with my own thoughts like I do.”

  Delia said, “Hmm.” Then, because she felt she wasn’t holding up her end of the conversation, she added, “I honeymooned by car.”

  “You did?”

  She had startled herself; she very nearly turned to see who had volunteered this information. “I don’t recall that it interfered with our focus, though,” she said.

  He glanced at her, and she gave an artificial cough. Probably he thought she’d meant something risqué. “Of course, my husband was not so attuned to driving as you must be,” she said.

  “Ah,” Mr. Lamb murmured. “No, not many people are, I suppose.”

  Sam’s car at the time had had a bench seat, and Delia had sat pressed against his side. He had driven left-handed, with his right hand resting in her lap, his fingers loosely clasping her nylon-clad knee, their steady warmth sending a flush straight through her. She coughed again and gazed out her window.

  The passing houses looked arbitrarily plunked down, like Monopolyboard houses. The smaller the house, it seemed, the more birdbaths and plaster deer in the yard, the tidier the flower beds, the larger the dish antenna out back. A brown pond slid by, choked with grappling tree trunks. Then more woods. In Delia’s girlhood, the very word “woods” had had an improper ring to it. “So-and-so went to the woods with So-and-so” was the most scandalous thing you could say, and even now the sight of winding, leafy paths conjured up an image of … Well.

  Goodness, what was wrong with her?

  She forced her thoughts back to Mr. Lamb. He seemed to be talking about dogs. He said that after he and Belle were married they might just get themselves one, and then he went into a discourse on the various breeds. Golden retrievers were sweet-natured but sort of dumb, he said, and Labs had that tendency to whap a person’s knickknacks with their tails all the time, and as for German shepherds, why …

  Gradually the scenery began to have a different feel to it. Around Easton she started noticing bookstores and European-car dealers, neither of which existed in Bay Borough, and by the time they hit Grasonville, the road had widened to six lanes that whizzed past gigantic condominiums, flashy gift shops, marinas bristling with masts.

  Mr. Lamb settled finally on a collie. He said he might name it Pinocchio if it had one of those long, thin noses. They crossed the Kent Narrows bridge, high above the grassy marshland. Delia could remember when crossing the Kent Narrows could use up the better part of an hour—long enough to get out of your car and stretch your legs and buy a watermelon, if you wanted—but that was in the days of that cranky old drawbridge. Now they were beyond the narrows in no time flat and speeding through a jungle of factory outlet stores, strip malls, raw new housing developments with MODELS NOW OPEN! DESIGNER TOUCHES! And then here came the lovely, fragile twin spans of the Bay Bridge, shimmering in the distance like something out of a dream, while Mr. Lamb decided that he might let Pinocchio have one little batch of puppies before they got her fixed.

  The countryside seemed so green, so lush, after the scoured pallor of the Eastern Shore. Delia was surprised when they turned onto Highway 97—a road she’d never heard of—but then she relaxed in the glide of brand-new pavement not yet bordered with commercial claptrap.

  She might have been away for decades.

  Mr. Lamb said Belle was scared of dogs but he thought it was all in her head. Where else could it be? Delia wondered. Not that he gave her a chance to ask. He said women just got these notions sometimes. Delia smiled to herself. It amused her to see how quickly he had come to take his happiness for granted.

  On the Baltimore–Washington Parkway, the lanes were so crowded that she gathered herself inward, as if that would help their car slip through more easily. She looked ahead and saw the Baltimore skyline—smokestacks, a spaghetti of ramps and overpasses, monster storage tanks. They began to pass gray-windowed factories and corrugated-metal warehouses. Everything seemed so industrial—even the new ballpark, with its geometric strutwork and its skeletons of lights.

  “Mr. Lamb, ah, Horace,” she said, “I don’t know where you’re headed, but if you’ll drop me at the train station, I can grab a taxi.”

  “Oh, Belle told me to drive you direct to the door.”

  “But it’s only …” She checked her watch. “Not quite ten,” she said, “and I don’t have to be there till eleven.”

  “No, no, you just sit tight. Belle would never forgive me,” he said.

  She would have put up more of an argument, but she was afraid her voice would shake. All at once she felt so nervous. She wished she’d worn a different dress. In spite of the gloomy weather, it was warmer than she had expected, and her forest-green was too heavy. It was also too … Miss Grinsteadish, she realized. Luckily, though, she had brought other clothes. (She had debated which was worse: wearing the wrong thing or lugging a suitcase to a wedding, and like the most insecure schoolgirl, she had opted for the suitcase.) Maybe once she
reached the house she could duck into a vacant room and change.

  Mr. Lamb was asking her a question. Which street to take. She said, “Up Charles,” using as few words as possible. She didn’t seem to have enough air in her lungs.

  How intimate this city seemed! How quaint and huddled to itself! After all those superhighways, Charles Street threaded between tall buildings like the narrowest little river in a ravine.

  She opened her bag and searched for Susie’s invitation. Yes, there it was, safe and sound.

  Mr. Lamb was admiring the Johns Hopkins campus now. He said he had a cousin who had gone there for one semester. “Oh, really?” Delia murmured. He said he himself had not had the opportunity of a college education, although he felt he would have put it to good use. Delia wished he would stop talking. He was so irrelevant, so extraneous. She kept swallowing, but there was something in her throat that wouldn’t go away.

  When she told him to turn left he had to ask her to repeat herself. “Hah?” he asked, like a deaf old man. Like an irritating, deaf old man.

  At a red light on Roland Avenue, a jogger ran toward them, a young woman with her long dark hair in a topknot and the fingers of her right hand delicately clasping two fingers of her left hand. A man in a tweed hacking jacket crossed with a tiny chihuahua. (“Now, there is a dog you couldn’t pay me to put up with,” Mr. Lamb said. “Might as well own a mosquito.”) The air had a greenish, fluorescent quality, as if a storm were brewing.

  She showed him where to turn next, which house to park in front of. (Was this how their house looked to strangers: so brown, so hunched, so forbidding?) She said, “I can get my things myself, if you’ll just pop the trunk.” But no, he had to unfold from the car, walk around to the rear, take forever hauling forth her suitcase. “Thanks! Bye!” she said, but even then she wasn’t free to go. He kept on standing there, swaying slightly on his long, scuffed shoes and gazing at the house.

  “We could easily manage the round one,” he told her.

  “Pardon?”

  “The round little window up top there, what is it, over a stairs? Rue-Ray makes round windows all the time.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, and she shook his hand, just to get him to leave. But an odd thing happened. Holding on to his bunched-twig fingers, meeting his bucktoothed, wistful smile, she unaccountably began to miss him. She felt like climbing back into the car with him and riding along for the rest of his trip.

  Four vehicles stood in the driveway: Sam’s Buick, a beat-up purple van, Eliza’s Volvo, and a little red sports car. The mulberry tree had already started to scatter its chewed-looking leaves, and she had to step around acorns on the front walk. Evidently no one had thought to sweep.

  The shutters had been repaired. The replacement louvers were a different color, though—a paler, flatter brown, as if they’d been given just a primer coat and then forgotten. There was a new sisal mat at the top of the porch steps, and a foil-wrapped pot of yellow chrysanthemums next to the door.

  Knock, or walk in?

  She knocked. (The doorbell would have been too much, somehow.) No answer. She knocked harder. Finally she turned the knob and stuck her head in. “Hello?”

  For a house that was hosting a wedding in less than forty minutes, it didn’t seem very welcoming. The front hall was empty, and so was the dining room, although (as Delia found when she advanced) the dining-room table was spread with a white tablecloth. She set down her suitcase, intending to continue into the kitchen, but just then Eliza walked through the kitchen door with a mug of something hot. She was concentrating so hard on the mug that it took her a second to see Delia. Then she said, “Oh!” and stopped short.

  “I know I’m early,” Delia told her.

  “Oh, Delia! Thank heaven you’re here!”

  “What’s wrong?” Delia asked. She was alarmed, of course, but also grateful to find herself in demand.

  “Susie’s changed her mind,” Eliza called over her shoulder. She was proceeding toward the stairs.

  Delia grabbed her suitcase and followed. “Changed her mind about marrying?” she asked.

  “That’s what she claims.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “This morning,” Eliza tossed back, starting upward. She wore a new dress, a magenta A-line Delia couldn’t imagine her buying, and patent-leather shoes whose heels rang against the stair treads. “Last night she slept in her old room,” she was saying, “and this morning when we got here I asked Sam, ‘Where’s Susie? Isn’t she up yet?’ and he said—”

  Delia felt disoriented. Susie’s old room? Where was her new room? And who were “we” and what place had they got there from?

  There wasn’t a sign of Sam. Not a sign.

  They had reached the second floor now, and Eliza, holding the mug in both hands, was sidling through the partly open door of Susie’s bedroom. “Look who I brought with me!” she said. Delia set her suitcase down and walked in after her.

  The room itself was what she noticed first. Frilly and flowered and stuffed with chintz since the days when it had been Linda’s, it was a hollow cube now, unsoftened by curtains or rugs, furnished only with a foldaway cot and an ugly, round-cornered bureau from the attic. Susie sat cross-legged in a welter of blankets, wearing striped pajamas. Surrounding her—seated on the cot as well but all dressed up, even overdressed—were Linda, Linda’s twins, and a pudgy young woman Delia could almost name but not quite. They raised a flank of alerted faces when Delia entered, but Delia looked only at Susie. Susie said, “Morn?”

  “Hello, dear heart.”

  She bent over Susie and hugged her, absorbing that unique Susie smell that was something like dill weed. Still holding on to her, she settled on the cot beside her.

  “Mom, I don’t want to get married,” Susie said.

  “Then don’t,” Delia told her.

  “Delia Grinstead!” Linda shrilled. “We’re trying to talk some sense into her, do you mind?”

  Linda was wearing bifocals—a new development. The twins had grown several inches, and from their dresses—stiff, mint-colored lace that hardly touched their skinny frames—Delia suspected they might be bridesmaids. Everyone looked so detailed, so eerily distinct: she couldn’t explain it. Her eyes kept returning to Susie, craving the sight of her uncombed hair and her sweetly round chin and her cushiony lower lip.

  The other young woman wore mint lace too. Driscoll’s sister, that’s who she was. Spencer? Spence. Driscoll Spence Avery’s sister, Spence Driscoll Avery. “This exact same thing happened with my cousin,” Spence was saying. “You all remember my cousin Lydia. She cried the whole way down the aisle of St. David’s, and now she’s happy as a clam and her husband is a bigwig in D.C.”

  “What kills me,” Susie told Delia (“kills be,” was how it came out, as if earlier she had been crying), “is we just signed a two-year lease on this fancy-shmancy apartment near the harbor. I’ve been phoning the realtor ever since last night, but all I get is his answering machine. I don’t want to say why I’m calling, because then he might not call back. I figure if I could just reason with him … I left three different messages; I told him it was urgent; I said could he please get back to me immediately? But he didn’t! It’s after ten and he hasn’t phoned and I’m stuck with that damned apartment forever!”

  She was wailing now. Eliza said, “Oh, dear, oh, dear … have some tea, why don’t you,” and Linda said, “Well, for God’s sake, Susie, the realtor is the least of it!”

  But Delia told Susie, “I’ll take care of it. You just give me his number, and I’ll keep calling till I reach him.”

  “Would you?” Susie asked. She jumped up, trailing blankets, and went over to the bureau. “Wait a minute, I’ll find his … Here. Mr. Bright, his name is. Tell him I apologize and I know I said we wanted it but to please, please let me out of this if he has a shred of human decency.”

  “You may have to forfeit your deposit,” Delia said, examining the business card Susie handed her.

>   “Delia! Honest to God!” Linda cried. “Could we address the issue here?”

  “Well, I’m not getting married, Aunt Linda,” Susie told her, “so why waste time discussing it? Has anyone seen my jeans?”

  She was roaming the room now, rummaging under the cot, scooping up a T-shirt. How shiny the floor was! Delia couldn’t help noticing. Then she recalled the refinishers from last year’s beach trip, and she felt all the more like an outsider. She set her handbag primly on her knees, trying to take up less space. But Linda noticed her anyway. She said, “Tell her, Delia.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “Tell her all brides go through this.”

  Did they? Delia hadn’t. Before her own wedding, her one concern had been that Sam would die before she got to be his wife. Groom Slain on Wedding Eve, the papers would read, or Tragic Accident En Route to Nuptials, and Delia would miss her chance for perfect happiness.

  She had never doubted for a moment that it would be perfect.

  Susie was dressing now, nonchalantly facing the wall while she peeled off her pajama top and hooked a gray-seamed bra. (Accustomed to locker rooms, she evidently thought nothing of changing in public.) Her back was a beautiful butterscotch color, as sturdy as a tree trunk. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, shook her hair loose, sauntered toward a suitcase on the floor, and bent to study its contents. Everybody watched. Finally Eliza, still holding the mug, said, “Susie has a very nice wedding dress. Don’t you, Susie. Show your mother your wedding dress.”

  “It’s a dopey dress,” Susie said, but she turned and crossed the room to fling open the closet door. White chiffon exploded forth. Both twins rose, as if pulled by strings, and floated toward the closet with their lips parted. Susie slammed the door shut again. A filmy white triangle poked through on the hinge side.

  “And your veil? Show her your veil,” Eliza urged.

  Obediently, Susie stomped over to the wastebasket. “Here’s my veil,” she said, and she pulled out several tatters of gauze and a headband of white silk roses snipped into jagged shreds.