Back When We Were Grownups

by Anne Tyler

  That got their attention, all right. Joey asked, “Are they having a DJ?”

  “Certainly a DJ! He’s bringing his own sound system, later this afternoon.”

  Joey punched the remote control and a Superman-type figure halted in mid-screen, trembling slightly. Then the two children slid off the couch and followed Rebecca downstairs. Lateesha’s beads sounded like an abacus clicking. (What a jewelry-laden family Min Foo’s was! Especially if you counted Joey’s watch, a black rubber, digital, multi-function affair whose face was about twice the width of his wrist.)

  “Biddy is doing the food,” Rebecca said, “and I tried to persuade them to hire NoNo for the flowers, but they said they always use Binstock.”

  “Rich people,” Joey said.

  “Well, yes, I guess they must be.”

  They were in the kitchen now. Rebecca started pulling boxes from the cupboard beside the sink. “Look at the decorations I bought,” she told the children. “Little rolled diplomas. Aren’t they cute?”

  But Lateesha was more attracted to a string of ancient, yellowing electric lights shaped like tiny wedding bells. “I want these,” she said firmly, and Rebecca said, “Well, but . . .” and then, “Oh, well, why not? We’ll pretend they’re school bells.” She held them up by the cord, which was the old striped, cloth-covered kind that was probably not all that safe. “These were strung across the mantel the first time I ever came here,” she said.

  “No, I want them high in the air.”

  “Well, we can do that.”

  They carried the boxes to the front parlor, and then Rebecca went back for a stepladder. When she returned, Joey was banging out the Jaws theme on the piano. “Here,” she told him, opening the ladder. “You climb up and hang the bells on those hooks along the moldings.” Then she gave Lateesha the little diplomas to set around, and she unfolded a crocheted cloth and spread it over the piano to hide all the stains and water rings.

  “The first time I ever walked into this room,” she told the children, “the bells were strung across the mantel and there was a kind of pagoda effect, a cupola effect, to the ceiling, from the twists of white crepe paper tied to the chandelier. It was my ex-roommate Amy’s engagement party and her family was making a huge, huge fuss. And I had come alone—I did have a boyfriend, but he was busy that night—and I walked in and I just about walked out again. Well, you know how fancy this place can look when the bald spots are covered up. There were flowers everywhere, white and purple lilacs, so many that the house was kind of shimmering with that heavy, mothball perfume lilacs give off. I was bowled over! And I didn’t know a soul; just Amy. She had transferred to Goucher, you see, after our freshman year at Macadam, and she had this whole set of Goucher girlfriends I had never met. So I was standing there with my mouth open, and Amy didn’t notice me because she was carrying on about her engagement ring—how she had wanted platinum but her fiancé wanted gold because his mother’s ring had been . . . and all at once I realized that the stereo was playing ‘Band of Gold.’ I thought, How appropriate! and I looked over at the DJ, who happened to be Zeb, only of course I didn’t know that. He was just this teenaged kid sitting behind a stereo, grinning straight into my face as if we shared a secret. He’d chosen that song on purpose! It made me laugh. And right at that moment, right while I was laughing, this man came up beside me and said, ‘I see you’re having a wonderful time.’ And that was your grandpa.”

  It felt peculiar to refer to Joe as a grandpa. He had died before he turned forty. In Rebecca’s mind he was forever young and handsome, and when she tried to imagine how he would have aged she had to guess from how Zeb had aged: those wide, spare, scarecrow shoulders grown stooped, the tangle of longish black hair threaded with thick strands of gray. Although Zeb lacked Joe’s expansive manner and his grace. He had always been more . . . shambling, you might say.

  She lifted the lid of the piano bench and sorted through the sheet music stored inside. Even at these teenaged affairs, some relative just about always ended up playing tunes for the others to sing along with. Songs from the 1950s, swing . . . She propped a folk-song collection on the music rack. She had observed that the sixties were back in favor right now.

  “I bet neither one of you have ever heard ‘Band of Gold,’” she told the children.

  Joey, perched on the ladder, shook his head. Lateesha just set another diploma on the coffee table. “Well, it’s not as if you’ve missed anything,” Rebecca said. “A simple-minded song; it was out of date even then. With this silly chorus behind it, baba, bababa . . . So there I was, laughing away, and your grandpa said, ‘My name’s Joe Davitch; my family owns this house, and that character flirting with you so outrageously is my kid brother, Zeb.’ Which meant I had to tell him my name—meanwhile wondering, you know, why he was just standing there and not circulating among the other guests, because at the time I had no idea the Davitches would normally let a party sink or swim on its own. He said, ‘Can I get you some champagne?’ and I said, ‘No, thanks, I don’t drink’—I really didn’t, in those days—and he said, ‘We’ll have to find you a ginger ale, then. Come with me,’ and he took my arm and led me off to the dining room. And just as we arrived, this woman came rushing out of the kitchen passageway. Mother Davitch, that would be. Your . . . great-grandmother; goodness! She was carrying a ham on a platter and I guess we took her by surprise, because when she saw us she said, ‘Oh!’ and stopped short, and the ham continued on without her. Slid clear off the platter and landed at my feet. You never saw such a mess!”

  This appeared to interest the children far more than their grandparents’ meeting had. Both stopped what they were doing to focus on Rebecca.

  “The poor woman burst into tears,” she said, exaggerating slightly in order to keep their attention. (Actually, what Mother Davitch had done was more in her usual style of just, oh, dribbling into tears; trembling and dissolving.) “Well, I didn’t know what to do. I was just a big, dumb college girl! And I was worried to death about my shoes: powder-blue pumps dyed to match my dress. There was this icky pink glaze all over them. I said, ‘Do you think I might have a damp cloth, please?’ Mother Davitch misunderstood; she perked right up and, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘never mind; Joe can see to that. But I will let you help with the other dishes.’ And that wasn’t the only misunderstanding, because while she was taking me to the kitchen she started going on and on about how she wished she’d known beforehand I was coming; how supper that night was just pickups on account of the party but I was more than welcome anyway; it worried her to death that Joe never brought any girlfriends home. I said, ‘Oh, um, I’m not . . .’ but it didn’t make the least bit of difference; she’d already got this notion in her head. Imagine what I felt! And then we came to the kitchen and there was Biddy, standing on a step stool trying to toss a salad. About five, she must have been. Yes, five: too young to do a very good job. There was more salad on the floor than in the bowl. Mother Davitch said, ‘You’ve met Joe’s oldest, haven’t you?’ I said, ‘Oldest? His oldest . . . child?’ Because underneath, I guess, I was already feeling attracted to him. Oh, I thought, he’s married. Except that Mother Davitch cleared that up in no time. Told me how Joe’s wife had absconded to seek her fortune and left all three of her children on Mother Davitch’s hands. Dumped them on her, was how she put it. Right in front of Biddy. ‘Dumped the whole crew on me and escaped to New York City.’ But you know Biddy. Biddy spoke up cool as cream; ‘Mommy’s going to be a famous nightclub singer,’ she said. And Mother Davitch said, ‘Well, so some would have us believe,’ and gave me this pointed look, but Biddy said, ‘She’s got this beautiful dress where the straps are made of diamonds.’ ‘Rhinestones,’ Mother Davitch said, but Biddy told her, ‘Diamonds.’”

  Lateesha stopping prinking a diploma bow to ask Rebecca, “Real diamonds?”

  “Well, according to Biddy they were.”

  Lateesha (who was not so much younger than Biddy had been, come to think of it) gave a sigh of satisfactio
n.

  “Meanwhile,” Rebecca said, “your grandpa was going back and forth with hot water and cloths, cleaning up the dining room. And finally he squatted down on the floor and started wiping my shoes off, right while I was standing there helping Biddy toss the salad.”

  The most memorable of the five senses, she often felt, was the sense of touch. After all these years she could still feel the heat of that damp cloth soaking through to her toes, and Joe’s strong, sure dabbing motion that had reminded her of a mother cat industriously bathing her kittens. And she remembered how, once he’d finished, he rose and clasped her arm to lead her away, his warm fingers firmly pressing the bare skin above her elbow. “Where are you taking her?” Mother Davitch had cried in alarm. (For the kitchen was a disaster and that ham had so far been the only dish that had made it to the dining room.) But Joe called over his shoulder, “Don’t worry; we’ll be seeing her again.” Even while Rebecca was wondering at this, she had felt a surge of pleasure.

  “We will be seeing you, won’t we?” he asked as they entered the rear parlor. “Are you in the Baltimore phone book?”

  “Oh, I don’t live in Baltimore; I live in Macadam,” she told him. “I go to Macadam College.”

  While she spoke she had looked elsewhere, trying to give the impression that she was offering this information with no particular purpose in mind. She watched the other guests from what felt like a great distance, noticing how flighty Amy seemed and how immature and tittering the girlfriends. (Joe Davitch, Rebecca surmised, was at least in his early thirties.) The fiancé—a loud-voiced, fraternity type—was expounding on possible stag-party sites. Paul Anka was singing “Diana” on the stereo, and the DJ sent Rebecca a grin and cocked his head significantly, although she didn’t know why.

  “I get out toward Macadam fairly often,” Joe told her. “Maybe I could look you up.”

  She let her eyes drift over to meet his.

  He said, “Well, enjoy the party. Goodbye, Rebecca.”

  Then he turned and went back to the kitchen.

  Rebecca just stood there for a minute, alone as when she’d first come but with a huge difference. She felt that her crown of gold braids, her blue dress, even her splotched shoes were compellingly attractive. She observed the other guests from a position of . . . power, she would almost say.

  “In a way, it was love at first sight,” she told the children.

  Joey just said, “Huh,” but Lateesha got all wide-eyed and intense. “I’m going to have love at first sight, too,” she told Rebecca.

  Rebecca said, “Well, I hope you do, dear heart.”

  * * *

  Min Foo was so late getting back from the doctor’s that Rebecca gave the children lunch—strawberry-jam-and-cream-cheese sandwiches. Poppy came downstairs and ate with them, although he spent most of the meal warning the children what to expect when they got old. “Step out of bed in the morning and your ankles refuse to bend,” he said. “Know what that feels like? Try it sometime. Try walking not bending your ankles. I clomp to the bathroom like Frankenstein’s monster. And then can’t pee. A simple thing like peeing that you would take for granted. Drip, drip, drip, it finally comes—”

  “Ooh, gross!” Lateesha said, screwing up her face.

  Poppy ignored her. “Then getting dressed,” he said. “Socks! Shoes! I have to have a special technique just for putting on my shoes. And Beck here has to tie them. It’s just like being a two-year-old. ‘Mom, will you tie my shoes, please?’”

  The front door slammed against the closet, and Min Foo said, “Hello?”

  “We’re in the kitchen,” Rebecca called.

  Min Foo came down the passageway, rustling and jingling. “Hi, everybody,” she said. “Oh, you’re eating.” She gave off the clinical smell of vinyl-upholstered waiting rooms and isopropyl alcohol.

  “How was your checkup?” Rebecca asked.

  “Dr. Fielding says I’m too fat.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t put it that way,” Rebecca said. “Won’t you have a sandwich?”

  “Mom! I say I’m too fat and you offer me something to eat. Finish up, kids; we’re late for your play date.”

  “Can I pour you some milk? Skim, I mean,” Rebecca said.

  “No, thanks. We’d better hit the road.”

  “Try driving a car when your ankles don’t bend,” Poppy piped up.

  “What, Poppy?” Min Foo turned to Rebecca. “I was thinking about your dream,” she said.

  “My dream,” Rebecca echoed. In the flurry of lunch, she had started to forget her dream. Now it came back to her, but with the boy more distant now, more of an other. “What about it?” she asked Min Foo.

  “If you dreamed you had a son, not daughters, and if the son was blond, not dark . . .” Min Foo was shepherding the children toward the front of the house, so that Rebecca had to follow her. “Well, it seems to me,” she said, “that you were dreaming how things would be if you’d chosen a different fork in the road. You know what I mean? If you’d decided on some different kind of life than you have now.”

  This struck Rebecca as so apt, and so immediately obvious where it hadn’t been before, that she stopped short. Oh, her girls could surprise her so, every now and then!

  “Anyway,” Min Foo was saying, “thanks for keeping the children. Kids, tell Gram goodbye.”

  Rebecca said, “Wait!” But then the telephone rang, and she had to turn back to the kitchen.

  Poppy, who never answered the phone even when he was sitting right next to it, looked up at her from a spoonful of strawberry jam. Rebecca glared at him and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” she said.

  “Mrs. Davitch?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Katie Border’s mother. The graduation party?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, here’s the problem: our daughter didn’t graduate.”

  “Didn’t graduate!”

  “Can you believe it? The little minx: she never said a word. And whatever notification the school might have sent us, I guess she intercepted. So this morning I was hanging out her dress—the ceremony was set for three, her dad had arranged to come home early, both sets of grandparents had flown in over the weekend—when ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘did I mention? I flunked chemistry.’ Well, at first I didn’t catch on. I mean, I failed to understand that flunking chemistry would keep her from graduating. ‘Great, Katie,’ I told her. ‘What if you need to know chemistry later in life? If you’re, I don’t know, shopping for rose food or something?’ And she says, bold as you please . . .”

  Rebecca started silently calculating her losses. The planning, the decorations, the deposits made to the disk jockey and the bartender. Alice Farmer, the cleanup maid, would demand to be paid in full regardless, although the waiter (Biddy’s son Dixon) might be more forgiving. The Borders would have to forfeit their own deposit, of course, but that didn’t cover everything. And Biddy would throw a fit. Most of her dishes were perishable and not the kind you could freeze. To say nothing of all her work, and the thought she’d given the menu.

  “Well, isn’t it fortunate,” Rebecca told Mrs. Border, “that you’d already set up this party. It sends a message, don’t you think?”

  “’Mom,’ she said to me . . . Message?”

  “When your daughter must be feeling so disheartened, so discouraged with herself. But here’s this wonderful party to show her how much you love her.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Davitch, I can’t imagine—”

  “And a message to your friends, as well. A sort of statement.”

  “My friends! I don’t know how I’ll face them. They’re all going to feel so sorry for me. Behind my back they’ll be telling each other—”

  “Mrs. Border, have you ever stopped to consider what a marvelous purpose a party serves? Think about it! At a moment when you and your daughter would normally not be speaking, when you know she must feel ashamed in front of the world at large and the world is surely wondering what to say to you, why, everyone�
�s thrown together in a gigantic celebration. Everyone’s forced to hug, and kiss, and toast the other graduates, and announce to everyone else that what matters is you all love each other. It’s like that scientific discovery they made a few years back; remember? They discovered that if you fake a smile, your smile muscles somehow trigger some reaction in the brain and you’ll start feeling the way you pretended to feel, happy and relaxed. Remember?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Imagine if you hadn’t had the foresight to schedule this party! Because we’ve been booked for months and months ahead, this time of year. You’d call and say, ‘Do you have an evening this week when we could throw a little fete for our daughter? She’s experiencing such, um . . . low self-esteem’—yes, that’s the term: ‘self-esteem’—‘and we want to show her we love her.’ I would have to say, ‘Sorry, Mrs. Border—‘”

  “And it’s true it’s going to be hard to cancel our guests,” Mrs. Border said. “If I had any hope of reaching just their answering machines I’d start telephoning this instant, but you know how people tend to pick up the receiver precisely when you don’t want to talk. I’d be forced to make all these complicated excuses.”

  “Oh! It would be so difficult!” Rebecca told her.

  “I did consider tacking a note to your front door, saying the party had been postponed due to unforeseen circumstances. Cowardly, I admit, but—”

  “And also wasteful!” Rebecca said. “Wasting that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a memory that will last long, long after your daughter’s made up her chemistry credits and graduated and gone on to college and you’ve forgotten all about her momentary little setback.”

  She stopped for air, and Mrs. Border said, “I guess we do have to remember what’s important here.”

  “Absolutely,” Rebecca said. She squared her shoulders. “Oh, one thing I’d meant to call you about: when shall I expect Binstock to bring the flowers?”

  “Well, they promised them for three o’clock, but now I don’t know if—”