Ladder of Years

by Anne Tyler

  Her face felt sticky, and her shoulder hurt where the handles of her tote bag chafed her sunburn. She switched the tote to her other side. She was almost there now, anyhow. She was planning on a tall iced tea as soon as she stepped through the door, and after that a cool bath and a little private visit with her cat. It was time to lure Vernon from under her bed, where he had taken up residence at some point during the night. In fact, maybe she ought to do that first.

  She smiled at a woman carrying a suitcase out of the cottage next to theirs. “Lovely beach weather!” the woman called. “Hate to leave it!”

  “It’s perfect,” Delia said, and she rounded a van parked in the driveway and climbed her own steps.

  Inside, the dimness turned her momentarily blind. She peered up the stairwell and called, “Vernon?”

  “What.”

  She gasped.

  “Somebody page me?” a man’s voice asked.

  He lumbered down the stairs—a chubby young man with a clipboard, dressed in jeans and a red plaid shirt. His moon-shaped face, with its round pink cheeks and nubbin nose and buttonhole mouth, reassured her somewhat, but even so she could barely draw breath to ask, “Who …?”

  “I’m Vernon, didn’t you holler my name? I’m here about the roof.”

  “Oh,” she said. She gave a shaky laugh and clutched her tote bag to her chest. “I was just calling my cat,” she told him.

  “Well, I haven’t seen no cat about. Sorry if I scared you.”

  “You didn’t scare me!”

  He squinted at her doubtfully. The satiny skin beneath his eyes glistened with sweat, which made him look earnest and boyish. “Anyhow,” he said. “Seems I’ll need to replace that flashing up top round the chimney. I won’t be doing it today, though; I got to get on back. So if those folks at the realtor’s phone, tell them I’ll be in touch, okay?”

  “Okay,” Delia said.

  He waved his clipboard amiably and headed past her out the door. On the steps, he turned and asked, “How you like my vehicle?”

  “Vehicle?”

  “Ain’t it something?”

  It was, in fact. She wondered how she could have missed it. Big as a house trailer, painted a metallic bronze with a desert landscape lighting up one side, it occupied the whole driveway. “Got a microwave,” Vernon was saying, “got a dinky little ’frigerator—”

  “You mean it’s for living in?”

  “Sure, what else?”

  “I thought vans would just have rows and rows of seats.”

  “Ain’t you ever been inside a RV before? Shoot, come on and I’ll show you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I—”

  “Come on! This’ll knock your socks off.”

  “Well, maybe I will take a peek,” Delia said, and she followed him, still hugging her tote bag. One section of the desert scene proved to be a sliding panel. Vernon slid it open and stood back to let her see inside. When she poked her head in she found gold shag carpeting halfway up the walls, and built-in cabinets, and a platform bed at the rear with storage drawers underneath. Two high-backed seats faced the windshield—the only sign that this was, after all, a means of transportation.

  “Gosh,” Delia said.

  “Climb in. Get a load of my entertainment center.”

  “You have an entertainment center?”

  “State of the art,” he told her. He climbed in himself, causing the van to tilt beneath his weight, and then turned to offer a hand as big as a baseball glove. She accepted it and clambered inside. The oily, exciting smell of new carpet reminded her of airports and travel.

  “Ta-daah!” Vernon said. He flung open a cabinet. “What it is,” he said, “in the bottom of this here TV is a slot for a videotape, see? Integrated VCR. Evenings, I just swivel it out and watch the latest hit movies from the bed.”

  “You stay here all the time?”

  “Just about,” he said. “Well, more or less. Well, for now I do.” Then he sent her a look, with his head ducked. “I’ll tell you the honest truth,” he said. “This van belongs to my brother.”

  He seemed to think the news would disappoint her deeply. He fixed her with a worried blue gaze and waited, scarcely breathing, until she said, “Oh, really?”

  “I guess I kind of gave the impression it was mine,” he said. “But see, my brother’s off on this fishing trip, him and his wife. Left his van at our mom’s house in Nanticoke Landing. Told her to watch over it and not let nobody drive it. Me is who he meant. But he’s due back this afternoon and so yesterday I got to thinking. ‘Well, durn,’ I got to thinking. ‘Here’s this fully equipped RV, been setting in Mom’s yard all week and I have not so much as tried that little microwave.’ So last night I stayed in it, and this morning I took it out to make my estimates. Mom said she don’t even want to know about it. Said not to drag her into it. But what can he do to me, right? What’s he going to do to me—haul me off to jail?”

  “Maybe he won’t find out,” Delia said.

  “Oh, he’ll find out, all right. Be just like him to have wrote down the mileage before he left,” Vernon told her gloomily.

  “You could always say you thought the battery needed charging.”

  “Battery. Sure.”

  “Does he live here? In the van, I mean?”

  “Naw.”

  “Well, I would,” Delia said. She bent to raise the seat of an upholstered bench. Just as she had expected, there was storage space underneath. She glimpsed woolens of some kind—blankets or jackets. “I would make it my year-round home,” she said. “Really! Who needs a big old house and all those extra rooms?”

  “Yeah, but my brother’s got three kids,” Vernon said.

  “Have you ever seen those under-cabinet coffeemakers?” Delia asked him.

  “Huh?”

  She was inspecting the kitchen area now. It was a model of miniaturization, with a sink the size of a salad bowl and a two-burner stovetop. A dented metal percolator stood on one of the burners. “They have these coffeepots,” she told Vernon, “that you permanently install beneath the overhang of a cabinet. So you don’t waste any space.”

  “Is that a fact.”

  “Actually, there’s a whole line of under-cabinet equipment. Toaster ovens, can openers … electric can opener you install beneath the—”

  “I believe my brother just uses the hand-cranked kind,” Vernon said.

  “Well, if this were mine, I’d have everything under-cabinet.”

  “Hand-cranked don’t take no space at all, to speak of.”

  “I’d have nothing rattling around,” Delia said, “nothing interfering, so at a moment’s notice I could hop behind the wheel and go. Travel with my house on my back, like a snail. Stop when I got tired. Park in whatever campground caught my fancy.”

  “Well, but campgrounds,” Vernon said. “Mostly you’d need to reserve ahead, for a campground.”

  “And next morning I’d say, ‘Okay! That’s it for this place!’ And move on.”

  “The rates are kind of steep too, if the campground’s halfway decent,” Vernon said. “Durn. Is that the time?”

  He was looking at the clock above the sink. Delia was glad to see that the clock, at least, was attached to the wall. In her opinion, there was far too much loose and adrift here—not just the percolator but sloppily refolded newspapers and videotapes out of their boxes and cast-off pieces of clothing. “What I can’t fathom,” she said, “is how you manage to drive with these things sliding all over. Wouldn’t you have flying objects every time you hit a speed bump?”

  “Not as I’ve noticed,” Vernon said. “But remember this ain’t my property. And speaking of which, my brother’s due back in like a couple of hours so I reckon I better be going.”

  “I wish I could come too,” Delia said.

  “Yeah. Right. Well, look, it’s been great talking with you—”

  “Maybe I could just ride along for a little tiny part of the way,” Delia said.

  “When—now?”


  “Just to see how it handles on the road.”

  “Well, it… handles fine on the road,” Vernon said. “But I’m going inland, you know? I’m nowhere near any beaches. Going down Three eighty past Ashford, way past Ashford, over to—”

  “I’ll just ride to, um, Ashford,” Delia said.

  She knew she was making him nervous. He stood staring at her, his eyebrows crinkled and his mouth slightly open, his clipboard dangling forgotten from one hand. Never mind: any moment now she would let him off the hook. She would give a little coming-to-her-senses laugh and tell him that on second thought, she couldn’t possibly ride to Ashford. She did have a family after all, and already they must be wondering where she was.

  And yet here stood this van, this beautiful, completely stocked, entirely self-sufficient van that you could travel in forever, unentangled with anyone else. Oh, couldn’t she offer to buy it? How much did such things cost? Or steal it, even—shove Vernon out the door and zoom off, careening west on little back roads where no one could ever track her.

  But: “Well,” she said regretfully, “I do have a family.”

  “Family in Ashford? Oh, in that case,” Vernon said.

  It took her a minute to understand. His eyebrows smoothed themselves out, and he leaned past her to slide the door shut. Then he flung his clipboard on the bench and said, “Long as you’ve got transportation back, then …”

  Speechless, Delia made her way to the front. She sat in the passenger seat and perched her tote bag on her knees. Next to her, Vernon was settling behind the wheel. When he switched on the ignition, the van roared to life so suddenly that she fancied it had been jittering with impatience all this time.

  “Hear that?” Vernon asked her.

  She nodded. She supposed it must be the engine’s vibration that caused her teeth to start chattering.

  Traveling down Highway 1 toward the Maryland border, past giant beach-furniture stores and brand-new “Victorian” developments and the jumbled cafés and apartments of Fenwick Island, Delia kept telling herself that she could still get back on her own. It would mean a long walk, was all (which stretched longer moment by moment). And when they entered Ocean City, with its honky-tonk razzle-dazzle—well, Ocean City had buses, she happened to know. She could take a bus to its northernmost edge and then walk back. So she rode quietly, beginning to feel almost relaxed, while Vernon hunched over the wheel and steered with his forearms. He was one of those drivers who talked to traffic. “Not to pressure you or anything, fella,” he said when a car ahead of him stalled, and he clucked at four teenage boys crossing the street with their surfboards. “Aren’t you-all hotshots,” he told them. Delia gazed after them. The tallest boy wore ticking-striped shorts exactly like a pair Carroll owned—that voluminous new fashion that billowed to mid-knee.

  When her family discovered she was gone, they would be baffled. Flummoxed. If she stayed away long enough, they would wonder if she’d met with an accident. “Or could she have left on purpose?” Sam would at last ask the children. “Did one of you say something? Did I say something? Was I mistaken to believe she wasn’t the type for an affair?”

  An airy sense of exhilaration filled her chest. She felt so lightweight, all at once.

  Then after they had had time to get really concerned, she would phone. Find a booth before night fell and, “It’s me,” she would announce. “Just took a little jaunt to the country; could one of you come pick me up?” No harm done.

  So when Vernon turned onto Highway 50 and started inland (talking now about the “differential,” whatever that was), she still said nothing to stop him. The percolator clanked on the stovetop; they rattled across a bridge she’d never seen before and entered a bleached, pale country entirely unfamiliar to her. She merely stared out the window. They passed yellowing, papery houses set in the middle of careful lawns that appeared to have been hand clipped, blade by blade. They flickered through leafy woodlands. “One place he flubbed up is not opting for a CB,” Vernon said, referring evidently to his brother, but Delia was just then picturing how Sam’s lips always formed a straight line when he was angry. And it occurred to her that what he might tell the children was, “Well, at least we can get things done right, now she’s gone.”

  “Besides which you will notice there’s no stereo,” Vernon said. “That’s my brother for you: he don’t care much for music. I say there’s something lacking in a man who don’t like music.”

  Maybe Eleanor would step in (speaking of doing things right). Oh, Eleanor would take over gladly—plan all the menus a year in advance and set up one of her Iron Mama budgets.

  “I guess you think that’s awful,” Vernon said. “To pick fault with my own brother.”

  Delia said, “No, no …”

  Here and there, now, gaunt old dignified farmhouses stood at the end of long driveways, with crops growing all around them and lightning rods bristling on their rooftops. Imagine living in such a place! It would be so wholesome. Delia saw herself feeding chickens, flinging corn or wheat or whatever from her capacious country apron. First she’d have to marry a farmer, though. You always had to begin by finding some man to set things in motion, it seemed.

  “But I’ll be honest,” Vernon was saying. “Me and him never have been what you’d call close. He is three years older than me and never lets me forget it. Keeps yammering about head of the family, when fact is he hardly lays eyes on our family from one month to the next. I’m the one takes Mom grocery shopping. I’m the one runs her hither and yon for her bingo nights and her covered-dish suppers and what all.”

  Why did everyone maintain that men were uncommunicative? In Delia’s experience, they talked a blue streak, especially repairmen. And Sam was no exception. Sam communicated all too well, if you asked Delia.

  She let her eyes follow a trailer park as they passed it. Each trailer was anchored by awnings and cinder-block steps and sometimes a screened extension. Whole menageries of plaster animals filled the little yards.

  “Now, you take this fishing trip: know who’s tending his kids? Me and Mom. Course mostly it’s Mom, but time I come home from work nights, she is so wore out the rest is up to me. But don’t expect Vincent to thank me. No, sir. And if he gets wind I drove his van, he’ll have my head.”

  In her tote bag Delia had five hundred dollars of vacation money, split between her billfold and a deceptive little vinyl cosmetic kit. She could stay away overnight, if she really wanted to alarm them—take a room in some motel or even a picturesque inn. However, all she had on was her swimsuit. Oh, Lord. Her scrunchy-skirted swimsuit and her espadrilles and Sam’s beach robe. But supposing she kept the robe tightly closed … Viewed in a certain way, it was not all that different from a dress. The sleeves were three-quarter length; the hem covered her knees. And hotels around here must be used to tourists, in their skimpy tourist outfits.

  They were approaching the edge of a town now. Vernon slowed for a traffic light. He was talking about his brother’s wife, Eunice. “I feel kind of sorry for her, if you really want to know,” he said. “Picture being married to Vincent!”

  “What town is this?” Delia asked him.

  “This? Why, Salisbury.”

  The light changed, and he resumed driving. Delia was thinking that maybe she could just get out here. Maybe at the next red light. But the lights from then on were green, and also they had reached a residential section, very middle class and staid. And then beyond were unappealing malls, and messy commercial establishments, and somehow nothing struck her as very inviting.

  “It’s my belief he hits her,” Vernon was saying. “Or at least, like, sort of pushes her. Anyways I know they fight a lot, because half the time when they come over she won’t look him in the face.”

  They were riding through open country again, and Delia was beginning to fear she had missed her last chance. It was such empty country, so cardboard flat and desolate. She gripped her door handle and gazed at a naked dirt field in which violently uprooted
trees lay every which way, their roots and branches clawing air. Unexpectedly Vernon braked, then took a sharp left onto a narrow paved road. “Three eighty,” he informed her. He didn’t seem to notice the clattering of the percolator behind them. “But this fishing trip they’re on is supposed to be a second honeymoon.”

  “Honeymoon!” Delia said. She was looking at a pasture filled with rusted-out cars. Around the next curve lay a ramshackle barn halfway returned to the earth—the ridgepole almost U-shaped, the warped gray boards slumping into waist-high weeds. Every minute, she saw, she was traveling farther from civilization.

  “Well, how Eunice put it to my mom,” Vernon said, “she put it that her and Vincent were going off on the boat by themselves, just the two of them together.”

  Delia thought that a trip alone on a fishing boat would strain the best of marriages, but all she said was, “Well, I wish them luck.”

  “That’s what I told Mom,” Vernon said. He swerved around an antique tractor, whose driver was wearing what looked like a duster. “I told Mom, I said, ‘Lots of luck, when her husband is Vincent the Dweeb.’”

  “She should give up on him,” Delia said, forgetting it was none of her business. “Especially if he hits her.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure he hits her.”

  Was that a brick building in the distance? Yes, and a grove of dark trees that cooled and relieved Delia’s eyes, and beyond them a sparkling white steeple. She knew there must be guest accommodations here. She gathered up her tote bag and smoothed her robe around her knees.

  “One time Eunice dropped by the house with a puffy place on her cheekbone,” Vernon said. “And when Mom asked where she got it she said, ‘I walked into a wall,’ which if it had been me I could have come up with a lot better story than that.”